Quote from: Come-from-Beyond on January 03, 2014, 10:49:10 AM

Quote from: notsoshifty on January 03, 2014, 10:42:59 AM

With this talk about sending to alias, do you have any thoughts on my question about what/when does the alias lookup?

Quote from: notsoshifty on January 02, 2014, 10:34:35 PM

As a side question: one important feature for nxt is the ability to send funds to a named alias rather than a number. I can see this being implemented in two ways:

1. Purely client side. The client looks up the alias to get the account ID, and then creates a transaction with that account (not alias) as the recipient
2. Within network/API. The client creates a transaction with the alias as the recipient, and the network (i.e. forging node, and other nodes through validation) translates the alias into an account id at time of forging

The second seems to me to be cleaner and preferred. Example: a transaction might take hours to get processed, and what's important is the account that the alias corresponds to at the time it gets processed, not when it is initially shoved into the network.

However, this would require API changes. And so any URI conventions that are adopted by browser extensions/addons would need to be adopted into the API.

Another point in favour of #2: I would rather see in the block chain a transaction that says I sent to 'bob', not to '123456789'.

"Send to alias" payment should solve this, right?

Perhaps - but can you clarify how this works? Does the client (or node that initially creates the transaction) lookup the alias at time of transaction to get the account ID, and then create a transaction with that account ID as recipient; or does it create a transaction with that alias as recipient (with the forging node doing the alias lookup when the block is forged)? If it is the latter, what format does the API expect the alias to be? E.g. '123456789', 'acct:123456789', 'acct:123456789@nxt', etc? Could it handle more complex alias URIs that bundle not only account number but also email address, web address, etc?