Last October, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) proponent and developer, Jonathan Silverblood, told the BCH community about a new identification system he developed that ties a custom human-readable alias to a bitcoin cash address. Silverblood has launched a beta version of the platform Cashaccount.info so visitors can test out the platform’s functionality and give the developer feedback. On the 10-year anniversary of the Bitcoin Genesis block, all beta account names will be invalid when the system finalizes on January 3rd.
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Bitcoin Cash-Powered Human Readable Account Names You Can Share in Conversation
Bitcoin Cash proponents can experiment with a new BCH-powered alias-address system called Cashaccount.info. News.Bitcoin.com reported on the initial development of the BCH name system that allows for human-readable account names tied to the keys of a BCH address. The protocol is open source and uses an OP_Return transaction when the name is broadcast and confirmed on the BCH network. Silverblood’s Cash Accounts code and specifications can be found on Gitlab if a user wants to review how naming the process works.
“The Bitcoin address system based on hashing data creates complex and difficult to share identifiers,” explains Silverblood’s motivation behind creating Cash Accounts on Gitlab. “While these identifiers have proper checksums and misspellings are rare, they are still very cumbersome to transfer over the telephone, in a regular chat or similar — Many attempts have been made to obfuscate the addresses by transferring them as QR codes or NFC tags, but the need for a human-accessible format remains.”
Experimenting With a Cash Accounts Name System Until January 3rd
News.Bitcoin.com tested the Cash Accounts platform by registering a temporary name using the beta version. Everything is fairly straightforward as you simply type your alias and tether the name to a public BCH address. After that, the user presses a button that says “Create Register Transaction,” which then gives the registrant a protocol number, account name, and payment data.
Pressing the “Broadcast Register Transaction” will then broadcast the information to the Bitcoin Cash network so miners can include the transaction in a block. The registrant will have to wait for the transaction to confirm in order to “Lookup” the name they just created. The process only took news.Bitcoin.com about 2 minutes to register and then waiting a few more minutes for the name “Posternut #3451” to be registered in a block.
The Cash Accounts concept could do well if a lot of users registered for usernames or aliases, but the protocol would also work more smoothly with a lot of infrastructure behind it. At the moment the Cashaccount.info website displays all the bitcoin cash supporting wallets the developer has reached out to for client compatibility. Wallets include BRD, Edge, Bitcoin.com, Electron Cash, Copay, Stash, Ledger and more. Some wallet providers have responded back and Silverblood has initiated pull requests for other clients.
What do you think about the Cashaccount.info concept? Let us know what you think about this platform in the comments section below.
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Images via Shutterstock, Bitcoin.com’s BCH Block Explorer, and Cashaccount.info
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