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

From: Gavin Andresen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:48:31 -0500

RE: IIBAN numbers:

Nifty!  Thanks for the pointers, I think we should avoid reinventing
wheels whenever possible.

When composing my last response in this thread I wrote, and then erased:

"There doesn't have to be one solution: I'd like to see some
experimentation, with clients supporting different schemes for bitcoin
address aliases, and maybe supporting plugins to extend the schemes
supported (a plugin would take a string, do some
behind-the-scenes-magic, and return a bitcoin address or public key)."

Defining Bitcoin as an IIBAN "institution", with 36^6 "accounts",
seems like a forward-thinking idea, although I'm not clear on exactly
how those 2.2billion "accounts" would get allocated and mapped into
bitcoin addresses.

I imagine some central organization that maps IIBAN account numbers to
domain names... and then clients (or plugins in the clients) query
that trusted central organization and then the account holder's domain
to get a (possibly unique) public key or bitcoin address.

As long as IIBANs are not the ONLY way of aliasing bitcoin addresses
to more-human-friendly strings I think that would be a fine way to do
it.

-- 
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Gavin Andresen