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I am still wondering why Bitcon has not created a scheme for user-friendly addresses. Remembering something like 19HcFgnnJseANJAHUjFifVwz68AGYrHc7v is way harder than Donate.P2PF or something like that. I think there is a URL service that offers a personalized handle, but implementing a better solution in the Bitcoin codebase shouldn't be so hard.

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It is hard. Very hard.

A bitcoin address is basically the hash of a public key. It's trivial to prove that you are the owner of the address.

Once you use names instead of addresses you need a mapping of names to addresses. Who owns a name? Who determines to which address a name maps?

The namecoin project is currently trying to solve this problem (and doing exactly what you suggested), but there are still lots of potential issues.

There is an interesting scheme called 'firstbits', which uses the blockchain (global, public, immutable) to determine the shortest prefix which uniquely identifies an address. At this point in time, an address can usually be identified with 5-6 hex digits.

Your 19HcFgnnJseANJAHUjFifVwz68AGYrHc7v address for example, firstbits down to 19HcFgn: http://firstbits.com/

Sorry... not hex: base64 (or whatever the bitcoin variant is.)

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