friendlier addresses?

[thesouljourner]

It seems like, one barrier to adoption for the mass market is how ugly and non-memorable addresses are. I know that on the back end they need to represent people's public keys, but it seems like it should be easy enough to hide that from the end user.  If the clients simply signed a document that said "this address may be aliased by this name", you could then have clients able to send money to the name not the address. You then have the clients verify that no one else has signed a document with that name to keep it unique. To support one name across multiple addresses, you can have that first address sign for other addresses, which could then sign for other addresses, etc.

That way, you could send money to something human readable rather than an unintelligible string of characters that is easily typoed or even maliciously altered.

Thoughts?

[grau]

One would only re-use an address for the sake of easy audit-ability. Think e.g. of donations.

Otherwise addresses are transitory helper that do not need to have any persistence or meaning after a transaction is done.
No one types addresses and they have a built in checksum to recognize typos.
Check out https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0070.mediawiki for a suggestion on how to bind an address for a transaction.

[thesouljourner]

No one types addresses now because it's so hard  

Here's some use cases:

Billy calls home from college and asks mom for money and wants to give her his address
The Red Cross has a tv/radio ad and wants to give a donation address

Basically any time you need to communicate an address through a medium that doesn't have copy nad paste (phone, TV, radio, billboards, in person)

Also useful because when you go back to look at your history you can tell who the money went to.

[tcallahan14]

I've been thinking about this too - I think the public keys could be a bit off-putting for people without a technical background. Maybe it's a non issue but I do think that a system similar to DNS could help bitcoin's adoption. Surely this could be achieved with some kind of decentralised system along the lines of what Namecoin is doing?

[andytoshi]

It is definitely a problem that users are seeing and manipulating addresses. Already this leads to people using the same address for multiple transactions, people developing all sorts of weird misconceptions about what addresses actually are, and people using addresses in ways which clearly tie them to their identity.

The solution is absolutely -not- some sort of DNS. Since ideally, addresses should only be used for a single transaction, the communication effort taken to publish an address and its owner (ignoring completely the problem of how to do this securely or verifiably, how to handle name collisions, etc, etc) could just as well be spent communicating the address directly when creating the transaction. This ought to be done by some sort of payment protocol, which would not only avoid address reuse and hide addresses from users, but would also make for easier negotiation of coinjoin-style tricks, spending across multiple addresses, and other privacy-improving features.

[exchanger]

That's not gonna work like that.

[thesouljourner]

Honestly, most people don't care about privacy. They just want something easy.  Making a new address for each transaction only works when the receiving party is an active participant in the transaction. This is often not true, such as a landlord getting paid by his tenants, or donations & tips.  Anonymity is there for people who want it, but many people would rather have some convenience instead. 

[gmaxwell]

Getting a new address in each transaction does not require continued active communications, this is one of the use-cases of BIP32.

Business payments absolutely cannot use common addresses because if they do you can't tell who actually paid you.  "What do you mean rent is due? I paid in txid 5. What do you mean unit 1 said that was his payment?!? it was mine!". There are all sorts of security issues that come from reuse before you ever ask about "anonymity".

Besides, this isn't a question of "anonymity" it's a question of basic financial privacy. Do you want your inlaws asking why you and your spouse are buying contraception when they told you they want grandchildren?  Do you want your employer asking you about the charities you support with the money from your paycheck?  Do you want the Barista at the coffees shop seeing that you are wealthy— maybe pointing you out to some thuggish friends as a target? Do you want your landlord saying "I see you got a 10% raise— so I know you can afford this 5% rent hike"?, or if you are the landlord do you want your tennants seeing what the other tenants pay? Do you want your business competitors knowing what your sales volumes are? Your suppliers knowing what your markups are?

Fair, equitable,  and safe transactions require privacy at every step. Human dignity requires a degree of privacy.  When you transact poorly in Bitcoin you don't just toss your own privacy, and you don't just toss it with respect to powerful state-actor boogiemen— you lose your privacy against grandma (and everyone else), and you cause other people to suffer reduced privacy too. When you pin an name on your coins then accept some from me or pay me some, then my finances are disclosed, to some degree, by-proxy.

No other financial transaction system has privacy as poor as Bitcoin's can be with bad usage, and so if we don't act to preserve privacy in Bitcoin the lack of it will be a serious shortfall which will rightfully discourage anyone from using it.

What you're proposing is a non-starter in several other respects as well.  It would require the network to maintain and serve a very costly index of these names that anyone could publish into— including abusing it for storing unrelated data like backups of their porn collection, increasing the cost of operating a node and degrading decentralization. If everyone doesn't run their own node indexing this data, then you end up with a centralized service that people depend on, spying on people, censoring access, or perhaps stealing funds with false responses. This scheme also has the problem that it's highly vulnerable to typosquatting: you might have your name, but I'll register all levenshtein distance one errors and common mishearings and then trivially capture coins based on both honest errors or malicious alterations.

Unlike what you propose it is very unlikely that any bitcoin address typo will result in a valid address, as they contain a 32 bit check value (e.g. only one in four billion addresses is valid, the rest will be rejected by all Bitcoin software— a property you can't achieve with registered 'friendly' names, generating a valid near-miss address in Bitcoin that you have the private key for is computationally intractable). Likewise, friendly names only make malicious alterations worse because they add the credibility of a correct looking name.

Getting easy and safe usage means not having people directly handle addresses at all.  Your landlord should be able to give you a sheet with a QR code on it (or the same data on an online invoice) that allows you to generate an endless series of addresses which are unique to you. You never handle any address directly, you just click pay on an invoice or scan something on a paper one. No ones privacy is lost, Bitcoin loses no value compared to other money-like systems, no crazy market distortion occurs from the inability to keep things private, no funds are stolen by typosquatters.

[BitcoinBarrel]

How hard is it to just email your mom or grandma your Bitcoin address or use a service like http://payb.tc/bitcoinbarrel

[msc]

use a service like http://payb.tc/bitcoinbarrel

Something like that would be pretty good if a few services teamed up and mirrored the database among them.

Here's another idea: add a feature to your wallet software to send an email containing a selected BTC address and its QR code.

[thesouljourner]

So, let me back up a bit. I didn't mean to say that my suggestion was the only way, or even a particularly good way. Mostly, I just wanted to suggest that there needs to be a way to make it easier for nontechnical people to use addresses even if they sacrifice a little privacy. Obviously, sacrificing all privacy is not acceptable.  Maybe there's no middle ground in Bitcoin, if so, then so be it. I just didn't want it dismissed out of hand just because it's not ideal in all circumstances.

I just looked up bip32, that does sound like a good fix for when you want to let someone make repeated payments without then all going to the same address.

Mostly, I just wanted to hide the ugly complexity of Bitcoin addresses from casual users.  I'll take a look at the rest of the BIPs and see if any sound like they'd cover what I'm talking about.

Apologies for being one of those noobs that comes in offering changes without properly knowing what I'm talking about.  I should have phrased my question more carefully.  Something like "is there a way to hide the complexity and ugliness and inherent illegibility of Bitcoin addresses from casual users, such that one can easily give out a single human readable token that can be used for multiple transactions possibly from multiple people?"

[andytoshi]

Mostly, I just wanted to suggest that there needs to be a way to make it easier for nontechnical people to use addresses even if they sacrifice a little privacy.

No, it should be much much harder.

Mostly, I just wanted to hide the ugly complexity of Bitcoin addresses from casual users.  I'll take a look at the rest of the BIPs and see if any sound like they'd cover what I'm talking about.

There you go

Apologies for being one of those noobs that comes in offering changes without properly knowing what I'm talking about.  I should have phrased my question more carefully.  Something like "is there a way to hide the complexity and ugliness and inherent illegibility of Bitcoin addresses from casual users, such that one can easily give out a single human readable token that can be used for multiple transactions possibly from multiple people?"

No, you're fine. If you had responded by insulting everyone who commented, insisted that you understand Bitcoin perfectly and everyone else doesn't, and that your idea would fix everything if only the damn developers would stop conspiring to shut you out, that would warrant an apology. (And yet, those people never offer one...)

[freedomno1]

For historical note

There was inputs.io and you could just acronym your wallet address
The issue is that you put your trust in the third party to secure your bitcoins and/if or when they lost those bitcoins it's tough luck.
Before that there was instantwallet etc.

The implementation of a short link like inputs.io/freedom for the Bitcoin client seems interesting as an idea, as it would remove the third party concerns of storing your bitcoin, while providing unique identification for the users, acting as a secure bank with recognized account numbers.

Say

Bitcoinqt/username send it to that unique username which represents an address from inside the client itself.

Similar to the blockchain wallet with the login option and unique identifier or alias the creator still needs to identify as the user to keep it secure.

If Bob wanted to send a Message to Alice from the QT client it would be possible to use Alias

Bitcoinqt/Bob Sends to Bitcoinqt/Alice 1 BTC
Verify

Replacing
Bitcoinqt/Bob343rf34s Sends to Bitcoinqt/Alice4224fssd

The key is easier memorization of addresses without impacting the secure functions of the bitcoin protocol people may easily remember the short term name but the address behind it remains the same

My only concern would be identification of similar sounding names, but this is solvable by verifying the underlying bitcoin address behind the alias before sending or having a unique message sent to the user before transactions but Gmaxwell has pointed out some other problems such as indexing.
 
That's an idea I'm sure was discussed somewhere else as well I just don't recall it.

Edit in: Think its the multi-sig function I was thinking about or Bips 10
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=329932.msg3665996#msg3665996
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=75481.0;all

[anti-scam]

Isn't this basically the payment protocol? And this is only tangentially related but I feel it would have been good to pursue a pronounceable, Urbit-like alphanumeric encoding of addresses such as "machec-binnev-dordeb-sogduc--dosmul-sarrum-faplec-nidted" (which represents 128 bits in Urbit) in the first place but I guess it's too late now.

[thesouljourner]

Isn't this basically the payment protocol? And this is only tangentially related but I feel it would have been good to pursue a pronounceable, Urbit-like alphanumeric encoding of addresses such as "machec-binnev-dordeb-sogduc--dosmul-sarrum-faplec-nidted" (which represents 128 bits in Urbit) in the first place but I guess it's too late now.

...for some definition of pronounceable? 

If it's going to be that long and that bizarre, I don't think the trade-off of length vs. sorta pronouncability is worth making.

And as others said, any one particular address should not be something users bother themselves with.

[doof]

I tried to provide a solution for this by mapping emails to an address www.coinbook.me

[andytoshi]

I tried to provide a solution for this by mapping emails to an address www.coinbook.me

Why would you post this? Here is a short list of obvious problems:
1. Everything mentioned in this thread so far about DNS models, which presumably you read since you're posting here.
2. The obvious security implications of people trusting you with a giant database of email addresses, and sending these to you, without HTTPS.
3. The obvious security implications of you publishing bitcoin addresses from your database, without HTTPS.
4. Only supports one bitcoin address per transaction; every additional one "succeeds" according to site but does not show up in the lookup.
5. You do not validate checksums. I was not only able to register bad bitcoin addresses, but even "addresses" which had various special characters and looked nothing like a bitcoin address.
6. Removing addresses does not work. The link in the confirmation email 404's.

I appreciate you are just trying to accumulate email addresses for whatever nefarious purpose, but this is inexcusably sloppy.

[rarkenin]

What about the blockchain itself storing these specialty addresses? An existing wallet would publish a short/friendly ASCII address, potentially with fees that would go to miners similar to other transactions.

[MadMoneyMachine]

I suppose one could use http://brainwallet.org/#converter to translate this address (using Base58Check instead of text):

1GoZzZBqG59VyDVeNRAjjscPwRL4guovWG

into this (poetry):

meet happiness eager like hill beam abuse confidence goodbye awake scary dude diamond flicker law

and then back again on the other end.

At least it might be easier to read over the phone?

I was further thinking that someone could re-write the poetry engine so that the first word is a person's name, the second word is a verb, the third word is an adjective and the forth word is a noun. Then there would be four sentences to remember.

[doof]

I appreciate you are just trying to accumulate email addresses for whatever nefarious purpose, but this is inexcusably sloppy.

fuck off.  we hash all our email addresses with salt.