Why not make it so one can use a Bitcoin address / keypair for messaging?
Bitcoin and Bitmessage keys will be interchangeable. Today I coded the key generation sections; Bitmessage will even save keys in Wallet Import Format.
However Bitmessage will use two keys- one for encryption and one for signing. Thus Bitcoin addresses (which are only a hash of a signing key) wouldn't be sufficient for Bitmessage. It seems to me that Bitmessage addresses could be turned into Bitcoin addresses but not the other way around.
This is gonna be cool.
Now you could store those Bitmessage/Bitcoin keys in a namecoin 'alias' namespace http://dot-bit.org/Namespace:Aliases and have the Bitmessenger client just send to a human-readable name from the namecoin blockchain ... voila ... end-to-end secure, autonomous look-up, authenticated, human-readable messaging system.
That is a good idea isn't it!
Unfortunately, I asked a 'hero member' (I forget who) on IRC about this possibility and why no one was doing it with Bitcoin addresses yet and he said that Namecoin is "more or less dead now. pretty much abandoned by its creators... it's been sort of spammed to death because they massively lowered the cost to get names, so there is effectively no anti-dos in it anymore."
Though that may be gone, the very notion that it could have and would have worked means that I personally believe that someone someday will come up with a way to link human-meaningful names to non-human-meaningful data (like Bitcoin and Bitmessage addresses). Then we will have solved Zooko's triangle!
I am only now realizing the implications of your project. It's like you took two steps at once. I posted about the first step here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/encryptdecrypt-arbitrary-text-using-bitcoin-keys-145098
Phelix: doublec and I were discussing this (over bitmessage as it happens) ... we could store bitmessage address in its own namespace in namecoin blockchain ... e.g. "bm/" namespace
$ namecoind name_new bm/phelix
$ namecoind name_update bm/phelix 'bm:oonwienfwna1244nfon aIKNneid'
or similar. Then we need a small piece of code, or an extension to bitmessage that looks up names from contact list inside bitmessage and pulls out the relevant BM-address from the namecoin blockchain.
I think the really cool part about this is you could have the code automatically generate new BM-addresses as often as you like and update the namecoin record at the same time. In this way, you can have your BM-address changing regularly for security, as suggested by BM author, but keep the name, i.e. bitmessage email address secured by namecoin blockchain in human readable form. If you need higher security and change addresses often you will incur more nmc fees and vice versa less security, less fees; you will pay for the security you get, in nmc fees.
Namecoin and bitmessage will work well together since they both solve different elements of resource allocation.
