My concern with the name Stealth Address is that it will end up being a niche feature that most people will not use. Peter's "Ohh, privacy is good!" argument makes sense among his peers, but will fall flat on most common users. Most people "Have nothing to hide" and aren't threatened by privacy, even with all the leaks and damage done. This should be viewed as a standard and non-scary option, and not something for criminals and troublemakers only. Stealth has those connotations, and I have a feeling it will become put in a corner. I think he is also a bit biased in that the super-plugged-in people (aka meetup attendees) have heard of this term and it's too late to change it. I disagree that it's really that well known, even within the Bitcoin community.
Names seem to fall out of describing how something is used or describing what it does. We should also focus describing traditional addresses as well, to see if there might be a way to relabel them.
Names seem to fall out of describing how something is used or describing what it does. We should also focus describing traditional addresses as well, to see if there might be a way to relabel them.
The way things are going with twister integration, it won't even matter whether we call them "stealth" addresses at all, because the average user won't even know they exist! When they make a payment it'll be to an identity - a person - not to some incomprehensible string of numbers. From that perspective, call them whatever you want.
Exactly. Addresses in general are going to be replaced by various payment protocols and identification systems. I think a good analogy is DNS: the vast majority of the time you type a DNS name into your URL bar in your browser. Behind the scenes that gets resolved to an IP address, and the fact that you can type an IP address instead of a DNS name is only possible because sometimes advanced users and developers need to debug things at a lower-level than you normally would use. Just like 95% of users have probably never heard the term "IPv4 address" in the future 95% of users will have never heard the term "stealth address"
As for now, we've got a lot of great press using the term, and changing the name now for vague reasons of "acceptability" will just confuse people when we start rolling out stealth address support in wallets for the early adopters to use.
Anyway, enough with this silly bike-shedding; lets get some work done.
I'm not pleased with any of the alternative names either, and as long as it is transparent to the user, all is well with me!
There still needs to be a name, though, even if it is the default. Users do know of "web address" to visit their webpage even if they don't know the magic of how it works underneath. Even something as bland as Payment Identifier could work for this purpose. Stealth address would be one specific type of such an identifier that could be used for more technical people who want to understand the guts.
Look at how much damage has to be undone because of a poorly named "Bitcoin Address". Names are far more than bikeshedding and can lead people to make very incorrect assumptions and lead people astray. My concern is mostly about mainstreaming the Stealth Address feature while not putting it in some pigeonhole of "oooh scary advanced secret stuff only bad people use". People that care about privacy are not going to be the target here. It's the people who say "so what" to the privacy claim. Stealth buys them nothing. But make it work without them knowing and you could call it ice cream dump truck and it's just as good.
