How about I should only have to know your Bitcoin receiving address, nothing more.

Re original post

Yeah, re-inventing finger and talk and ~username seems dubious given that those very functionalities were already rejected from the get-go by the gatesian masses.

We still have the code, so hmm what exactly were the problems with random spammers being able to "talk" at you or deduce your email from your webpage, again?

A lot of the stuff pointed to in original post and by what it points to etc seems to fail to say straight out from the get-go that history seemed to show that "faces" shouldn't be findable from email addresses and email addresses shouldn't be deduce-able from URLs. Oh I seem to recall too some history about email addresses not even appearing on pages that robots who ignore robots.txt might scrape.

I also see a whole lot of wanting to put random newfangled files in specific places then go auto-looking for them without so much as a tip of the hat to robots.txt.

Huh? What for are you digging around automatically on my site for random files other than robots.txt when my log shows you failed to first consult robots.txt to find out whether I wanted you to go looking for such a file and if so where I'd like you to please go look for it and where to please not look for it thank you.

Then some bitcoiners wonder why the paypal address I wave around cannot be spammed? Oh come to think it cannot be "talk"ed at either.

Is there any known way to teach yahoo chat about chatbots? A way to attempt it without going through a huge filling out of form (like, say, a this is a spambot button) would be nice, once you're on someone's CD of 10 million (or is it dvd of 10 billion now?) chat addresses you get a lot of bots constantly using exact same please add me and why spiel... Getting annoying to use yahoo mail via web. too bad they don't offer IMAP (yet?)

<rant>oops too late. oh well, </rant> then, my bad.

-MarkM- (archive.org wayback machine knotwork dot com squiggle guesswho)

markm > I do not agree with you because there's no need to link a virtual web identity with one real identity. Your avatar? Put any picture you want. It wouldn't be a problem to have multiple web identity (just like having multiple email address).

Everything is already there. For most internet user, given his name and/or his email address, it tooks only a couple of minutes to find his blog, his facebook/twitter account, pictures of him.

In the current situation, that web identity is spread around multiple services and that makes you lost control. For most user, they are not even aware how much of their life is public!

By making it clear, standardized, it would greatly improve the way we control our web identity. It is also easier to communicate. When you meet a new friend, you now have to ask for email/XMPP/facebook/twitter account and, at each step, wondering if you should add him or not, what he would think if you don't add him, etc.

In your article, you write:

"It is not possible anymore to be active on the web without an email address. Most services require that you provide a valid email address."

Don't you know about the excellent www.mailinator.com ?

Ok, I think I'm beginning to see where you getting at, although it's still not quite clear since in your article you actually mention several solutions that are quite close to what you're advocating (such as Diaspora).

I guess I just have to re-read your article.

I still don't know the details of how BitCoins work, but here is a thought: couldn't you send BitCoins to somebody's email address by creating both the private and public key and sending them both to the email address?

Or in fact even easier, just send a whole wallet as an attachment?

Maybe the current client is not yet multi-wallet enabled, but that should be easy enough to fix. Then you could just say "create new wallet", send money to that wallet, then mail it off

You can, but it allows the sender to double-spend, so you wouldn't want to accept the transaction until it appears in the block chain. That's not a big deal in this case, though.

The email would also need to be encrypted.