The number of proposals is not infinite, here are their problems :

- FirstBits : centralized
- DNS TXT Records : DNSSEC is required to have a minimum of security, limits usage to engineers, limits usage to some domain names (i won't be able to use a gmail address for example, because i don't control the gmail.com domain)
- Server Service (DNS + a daemon) : Same as DNS TXT records
- HTTPS Web service : relies on HTTPS and CA, bitcoin needs to be able to check the full certificate chain and access a list of up-to-date certificate authorities (installed on the OS or provided with bitcoin). And don't forget the CA model is not 100% reliable (several CA hacked this year + possible government control...).
- IP Transactions : This proposal seeks to enable DNS lookups for IP transactions => same as above

I know that providing a namecoin daemon with bitcoin is not the lighter solution, but, if a better one existed i guess it would have already been integrated into bitcoin... (see in what state is my first attempt with the HTTPS proposal : Send payments to emails, urls and domains in GUI - khalahan opened this pull request April 20, 2011)

So, what's next ?

Le 16/12/2011 20:54, slush a écrit :
Khalahan, honestly, using namecoin for aliases is (for me) clean example of over-engineering. I mean - it will definitely work if implemented properly. I played with a namecoin a bit (as my pool was the first 'big' pool supporting merged mining), but I think there's really long way to provide such alias system in namecoin and *cleanly integrate it with bitcoin*. Don't forget that people who want to do lookup need to maintain also namecoin blockchain with their bitcoin client. It goes against my instinct of keeping stuff easy.

For example, yesterday I implemented HTTPS lookup for addresses into my fork of Electrum client. I did it in 15 minutes, it works as expected, it does the job and the implementation is really transparent, becuase implementation is 20 lines of code. There's no magic transformation, no forced "?handle=" parameters or whatever. And I don't care if somebody provide URL https://some.strange.domain/name-of-my-dog?myhandle=5678iop&anything_else=True

And everybody can do the same in their clients, in their merchant solutions, websites or whatever. Everybody can do HTTPS lookup. But try to explain DNS, Namecoin, IIBAN, email aliases to other programmers...

Those IIBAN - well, why not. At least I see the potential in PR. So far I understand it as some teoretic concept which is not supported by anything else right now. Give it few years until it matures and then add IIBAN alias to Bitcoin client too.

Maybe I'm repeating myself already, but the way to go is to make aliases as easy as possible, so everybody can implement it in their own solution and thus practially remove the need of using standard bitcoin addresses for normal users. Using some superior technology, which is hard to implement or even understand won't solve the situation, because it will ends up with some reference implementation in standard client only and nobody else will use it.

slush

-- 
Best Regards,
Khalahan
http://dot-bit.org/