I have a group of dev's that have been working on a service for over a year and just not getting around to growing the integration. I've reached out Evan about the service and haven't heard back. People say they want it easy but then they actually have to make the steps to become easy. From my first day in crypto I HATED public keys. They will always be the #1 turnoff for anyone. As soon as they see them, they turn off and move on. Its just too confusing. Before the great INET, we had BBS's and those BBSs had telephone numbers. No one remembered the number but they remembered the name. DNS for websites did the same and buying a domain name was might more expensive than today. Now take that and apply it to crypto. (Did I mention I HATE public keys.)
I think the idea in itself is great, but there are a couple of things I don't know how to weight them
- So far I was completely happy when someone sends me his/her pubkey and I put a name on it in my wallet. But others my want more of course
- It's centralized. As long as it's not widely used (with servers and mirrors for MY domain instead of one instance having it all) that's a weak point. Servers get DDOSed/hacked/whatnot and you'd have a lot of problems.
- It kind of contradicts the "anonymous" part of Dash
But again, don't get me wrong, I think it's a cool idea. Make it P2P (e.g. each wallet serves it's own names or something like this. Or delegate it to Masternodes) and it would be perfect.
Thanks for the response.
Comments,
1> I agree, some are comfortable with the public key setup and don't need to change a thing.
2> Correct, its a central process currently as we have many moving parts with little adoption. As the base grows and as you are able to interact with the datastore directly, we will see this becoming more decentralized. We do plan on storing the data in a chosen decentralized datastore and have already put 50 BTC toward those projects (when BTC was $600+) . Once a decentralized data store contains the keys, services can be built on those or those can be access directly. If we tried to go the other route of just putting a wrapper NMC we are limiting us to the specific features that coin currently has. We are going through many iterations right now to make the integration as smooth as possible then we can step back.
3> Posting a public key is the market we are going after. Donation addresses, email signatures, when you are just talking to someone. This is also just the first step. Once you have a primary "vanikey" or whatever it will be called. Adding other cryptographic public keys can be introduced and leveraged by systems without a user doing anything. Example. PGP. Send an email to someone, it finds the public PGP string, encrypts and then sends to you. The unencrypted text never left the original machine and they didn't even have to do anything. What about people that hold BTC & LTC and I hold LTC and DASH. In that senerio, if I send that person LTC it would be a pass through but if I try to send DASH, no public key would be found and something like Shapeshift could do the conversion so you never even know there was any friction when paying someone and the other person gets and holds the coin of their choosing. I personally hold about 6 coins. I can associate all of them to a single payable address and they are broad enough that I can receive funds from almost any coin.
You can also introduce proving you own a key (sign message), and have added features implemented on top of that particular lookup. There are just so many possibilities but the market is so fragmented right now, looking to create a bridge.