Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: [BIP 15] Aliases

From: Amir Taaki <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:37:06 -0800 (PST)

lol, way to miss the point nanotube.

FirstBits *is* useless, but not for the reasons you specified. But simply because the resources it needs rises exponentially as the number of participants in the network grows linearly.

The point is that if FirstBits were built into the implementation, that would allow me to simply send to 1brmlab. The proposal here is not for a website where people can lookup bitcoin addresses, but a shared naming scheme between bitcoin implementations. Here's the story again:

> I was in brmlab and wanted to pay 1 BTC for a Club Mate. They had 
on the wall a picture of their QR code and a bitcoin address. I don't 
own a mobile phone so the QR code is
> useless. Then I remembered FirstBits, went to my terminal and typed
> 1brmlab. I got their bitcoin address from the website and copied that,
> then opened my terminal and pasted that in to send 1 BTC.

In our revised history, I simply send 1 BTC to brmlab

BOOM.

Club Mate

----- Original Message -----
From: Daniel F <[email-masked]>
To: Amir Taaki <[email-masked]>
Cc: "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]>
Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2011 2:32 AM
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: [BIP 15] Aliases

> I was in brmlab and wanted to pay 1 BTC for a Club Mate. They had on the wall a picture of their QR code and a bitcoin address. I don't own a mobile phone so the QR code is
> useless. Then I remembered FirstBits, went to my terminal and typed
> 1brmlab. I got their bitcoin address from the website and copied that,
> then opened my terminal and pasted that in to send 1 BTC.

ok, imagine if firstbits didn't exist. instead of going to firstbits,
you would have gone to your terminal, opened up brmlabs website, and
copied the address from there?

there may be some arguments for name-> address translation, but i'm
sorry to say, that your example is not one of them. if anything, it
seems to suggest that firstbits is completely useless, since it saves
approximately zero effort.