[ANNOUNCE] thewalletlist.com - store your btc address in the cloud

[qxzn]

Greetings,

Wouldn't it be nice if sending bitcoins was as easy as sending email?
Hopefully soon it will be..

thewalletlist.com opened its doors today. The core of the site is a
simple mapping from email addresses to bitcoin addresses. Registering
is free and you can add as many email addresses as you like.

Once you're signed up, if someone wants to send you bitcoins, they
don't need to remember your address -- they can just look it up.

There is also a simple API for easy integration with bitcoin apps.

Check it out and let us know what you think!

 - thewalletlist.com devs

[mc_lovin]

oh, awesome!  well done and an asset to the community.

[ThomasV]

please read this: http://ecdsa.org/bitcoin_URIs.html  (the part on aliases)

[Matoking]

Can you claim any e-mail address as your own, or do you have to authenticate by sending an e-mail?

[qxzn]

please read this: http://ecdsa.org/bitcoin_URIs.html  (the part on aliases)

Thanks for the link. That looks a bit more complicated than what we're doing, but definitely promising. Is there something in particular you wanted to point out?

By the way, it would be awesome if electrum had support for querying the wallet list!

[qxzn]

Can you claim any e-mail address as your own, or do you have to authenticate by sending an e-mail?

There is a standard email confirmation procedure before any listing goes active. Feel free to try it out and send your feedback -- it's free and you can always remove your bitcoin address if you like.

[ThomasV]

please read this: http://ecdsa.org/bitcoin_URIs.html  (the part on aliases)

Thanks for the link. That looks a bit more complicated than what we're doing, but definitely promising. Is there something in particular you wanted to point out?

Yes, I wanted to let you know that there is an ongoing discussion on aliases.
The proposal that I made might not be the final one, but it is already supported by Electrum.
In addition, the developer of Multibit is considering adding support for aliases into his client soon.

Another thing that I wanted to point out is that aliases can be signed.
This adds some level of protection against hijacking.
 - an alias can be signed by a trusted authority. For example, your website could play that role, if you decide to host aliases.
The trusted authority should be reputable and not subject to hacking.
In addition, it may provide various services, such as verification of real-world identity, etc.
 - an alias can be self-signed. This will protect only the users who have seen that alias previously, because their client will detect that the hijacked alias has a bad signature.

By the way, it would be awesome if electrum had support for querying the wallet list!

The current proposal does not allow a website to host aliases from other domains, but we could add this as an option in Electrum if your service is successful.
For addresses that belong to your domain (thewalletlist.com), all you need to do is a minor modification of your API :

Code:

    https://thewalletlist.com/bitcoin.id/<email prefix>

[finway]

Great! I have got the same idea.

[qxzn]

Another thing that I wanted to point out is that aliases can be signed.
This adds some level of protection against hijacking.
 - an alias can be signed by a trusted authority. For example, your website could play that role, if you decide to host aliases.
The trusted authority should be reputable and not subject to hacking.
In addition, it may provide various services, such as verification of real-world identity, etc.
 - an alias can be self-signed. This will protect only the users who have seen that alias previously, because their client will detect that the hijacked alias has a bad signature.

The signing stuff looks interesting. We are definitely open to new ways of making the service more secure and reassuring to our users.

By the way, it would be awesome if electrum had support for querying the wallet list!

The current proposal does not allow a website to host aliases from other domains, but we could add this as an option in Electrum if your service is successful.
For addresses that belong to your domain (thewalletlist.com), all you need to do is a minor modification of your API :

Code:

    https://thewalletlist.com/bitcoin.id/<email prefix>

Making that tweak would be easy, but not really useful for now as nobody really uses @thewalletlist.com email addresses. We would be happy to make changes to the API to accommodate electrum queries if you decide to allow cross-domain alias hosting.