So I just had a random idea and I wanted to see if there's any interest in me developing this (after DarkSend of course).
I think it would be really neat and much more friendly if you could type something like "Evan" in the Pay To field. Bitcoin/Darkcoin addresses are just really long and impossible to remember, it's even harder to show a Bitcoin address in a video or picture without a QR Code.
The solution? Named Addresses
When mining, the miner who successfully mines the block could "name" a darkcoin address. It would be permanently added to the block chain as an alias of that darkcoin address. The names could be up to 8-20 characters and would be paired with the 160 bit address. Upon loading the blockchain the client would form a cache of all of these and then they could be used in place of the full addresses.
It's decentralized, permanent and tamper proof.
The block explorer could even show the alias instead of the address when it had it available, so in a DarkSend you could tell that "Evan" paid someone, but you would have no idea who.
How do you get a name?
This could be an opportunity for the pool operators to make extra cash. They would take orders for name/address pairs and tell the daemon which ones to add to the blockchain next. The blockchain could only support 1 of these per block, so there could be a premium for adding them. Eventually I could see a centralized market where you buy a spot in the queue to get a name.
Thoughts?
I think this is an awesome usability feature, but not so relevant to the spread and positioning of Darkcoin at its current and near-term stage.
Everyone agrees here that the major obstacle that drk faces now is getting exposure to the greater population. I see this achieved either by marketing [as suggested by many] or by begin trading in a prominent exchange with loads of users and cash [as voted by many here in poles].
In regards to marketing, I believe we need to start sending emails to every blogger out there.
In regards to trading, we were very unfortunate to be traded on 2 exchanges that got hacked this month. This impacts users' confidence and willingness to transfer coins into an exchange and buy drk.
Right now, this point-of-failure called "an exchange" is imho our weakest link. Our daily volume is shrinking and no big exchange is pushing the coin.
i've heard NXT users speak about p2p trading, where you don't need an exchange any more and your coins are safe in your own wallet. If this is not a development that would take months, perhaps this could be our next feature, and by doing so, we leap above the exchange factor.
In any case, I believe we should be getting out of Beta real soon and stating to the world - "It works. It's trustworthy. It's anonymous."
I think more useful would be the ability to also send small, twitter-sized messages instead of just transactions via darksend. Imagine that you could combine a transaction with a message or something like that. Hash the characters together and send it like a transaction, and all of a sudden, you have a really well encrypted, anonymous message system that overlays on an existing network.
