There may be some value in retaining "address", as "address book" is a familiar concept for having a list of thing-I-remember (name) linked to thing-I-don't-remember (address), and "email address" is a familiar concept as a unique destination. If we replace address with account number, what do we call "Address Book"? I checked on my online banking, and the equivalent they have are "beneficiaries" in a "favourites" list, which I suppose is ok (although I've never been fond of "beneficiaries"..."recipients" maybe?) I'm not averse to dropping "address", as long as we can find a convention that fits.
One additional thing to consider: we are looking at ways of packing the payment ID into the "address" so that there are no longer issues with it being a separate thing that people forget. In this regard alone I lean towards address rather account number, because with a bank you pay into a person's single account number and allocation is manual/semi-automated, whereas with this you'd pay into seemingly-unique "addresses". Conceptually I would think this is somewhat similar to Gmail's functionality where you can receive email to [email protected] and it tags them with the bit after the +.
I think the 24 word "seed" is fine as a term, since it conveys the sense of "thing that everything else grows from" which underscores its importance, else we should call it a 24 word "key"? We will have additional formats that can be used to store your seed, such as a password-encrypted, base58-armoured version. Given that the use of stealth addresses removes the need to have multiple addresses in your wallet (and thus multiple privkeys) we can use the term "seed" or "key" comfortably (I have no preference between the two).
I think the wallet/account MUST be "familiar and easy to use" ..
The simpler the better ..
I'm in that "wider population non-technical user" demographic ..
I'm in my 60's, somewhat computer literate, willing to try and learn ..
That said, the "key" imho to mass adoption of any crypto is going to
be 100% on the ease of useablility/security/functinality of the wallet/account ..
Please consider the NXT brain wallet as a potential wallet/account to model after ..
It has several attractive features ..
The simpler the better ..
I'm in that "wider population non-technical user" demographic ..
I'm in my 60's, somewhat computer literate, willing to try and learn ..
That said, the "key" imho to mass adoption of any crypto is going to
be 100% on the ease of useablility/security/functinality of the wallet/account ..
Please consider the NXT brain wallet as a potential wallet/account to model after ..
It has several attractive features ..
A brain wallet is a terribly bad idea, not in and of itself, but because people are terribly bad at setting secure passphrases. Even a seemingly safe, single line from a very obscure Afrikaans poem got someone's brainwallet hacked and 4 BTC taken from it. It doesn't matter how much we educate, people are simply not going to use secure passphrases. If we enforce certain things automatically (say, 25 char minimum length, automated Google search must return no results, must not exist in previously known password caches) we are not only compromising our users by sending their secure password out to check (thus exposing it), but we are raising the barrier to entry to a point that is high enough to irritate newcomers and cause them to walk away in frustration.
The 24 word seed is sufficient for you to use Monero on any computer, and we can definitely look at ways of having a much shorter, password-encrypted base58 token in future.
