Is this possible? I know SPV works by proving the tx through giving you the hashes to reconstruct the Merkle Tree, which means it can prove a tx is in a block, which isn't good enough for namecoin names, since proving a name doesn't prove that a new update hasn't happened. I'm trying to figure out if there's a "lite client" way to prove a current name, and before I spent days thinking on it, I wanted to make sure the problem hadn't already been solved. Has somebody figured this out yet?
If they haven't, and if I can (a big if), that would have huge implications for user experience, since sites and lite clients could use BIP0070 or BIP0072 payment requests, and the address books and lite clients could just show the user the name aliases rather than addresses, and users could register their own aliases via the client. (And aliases could be registered with stealth addresses instead of static addresses for privacy reasons if you wanted.) In combination, that would mean the user experience of Bitcoin could be *entirely without seeing addresses*, which would be a big deal for the average Joe's normal use. It would mean that "lite servers" would have to run Electrum, SPV-Namecoin, and Obelisk servers, but I think that's worth it... I'd run that tuple.
Idea sparked by
this thread.
