Sending Money Like Sending E-mails: Cryptoaddresses, The Universal Decentralised Identities

TL;DR

This paper proposes a user-friendly decentralized system for cryptocurrency addresses, replacing complex cryptographic strings with memorable identifiers, inspired by email systems, to enhance usability and applicability across cryptographic systems.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel decentralized identifier system for cryptocurrencies, improving usability by replacing cryptographic addresses with memorable identifiers, inspired by email architecture.

Findings

The proposed system is directly applicable to various cryptographic identifier systems.

It demonstrates improved usability over traditional long cryptographic addresses.

The approach maintains decentralization while enhancing user experience.

Abstract

Sending money in cryptocurrencies is majorly based on public keys or their hashed forms -- "addresses." These long random-looking strings are user unfriendly for transferring by other means than via copy-and-paste or QR codes. Replacing such strings with identifiers chosen by users themselves would significantly improve usability of cryptocurrencies. Such identifiers could be memorable, easier to write on paper or to dictate over phone. Main challenge lies in designing a practically usable decentralised system for providing these identifiers. Former solutions have been built as centralised systems or come with nonnegligible limitations. Our solution is reminiscent of a prevalent e-mail system, which is an already user friendly and desirably decentralised system. It is shown that our approach is directly applicable also to other systems that use long cryptographic identifiers.