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

From: slush <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 20:54:35 +0100

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

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 6:23 PM, Khalahan <[email-masked]> wrote:

> **
> Namecoin is a peer-to-peer generic name/value datastore system.
> Don't forget it's not limited to .bit usage ! So, directly mapping things
> to .bit url would not be the optimal way of using namecoin.
>
>