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Wallet Address Aliases

CIP: 0001
Title: Wallet Address Aliases
Authos: TP
Status: Stable
Created: 2017-10-31
License: BSD-2-Clause

Purpose

Wallet addresses are hard to memorize. This document specifies an open alias stream named alias that can be used to register one human readable unique alias per address.

Schema

The alias-stream is readable and writable by every blockchain participant. An alias is registered as stream key in the alias-stream without any data. The wallet address of the alias is derived from the stream-item-publisher who signed the publishing transaction.

Updating

A previously registered alias for an address can only be updated by the original registrant. This is done by publishing a new available alias as key to the alias-stream signed by the same publishers address. Updating an alias releases the old alias for registration by other wallet addresses.

Re-Assigning

An alias can be re-assigned to a new address after the autoritative owner has released the alias by registering another alias to his address.

Validation

The first occurence of an unregistered or previously released alias is to be treated as the authoritative entry.

A valid alias stream entry has to have:

  • at least one confirmation
  • exactly one publisher
  • emtpy data-hex
  • a key that is a a valid alias
  • a key that is not already assigned to another publisher (Wallet-ID)

A valid alias must match the following regex:

^                  # beginning of string
(?!_$)             # no only _
(?![-.])           # no - or . at the beginning
(?!.*[_.-]{2})     # no __ or _. or ._ or .. or -- inside
[a-z0-9_.-]{3,30}  # allowed characters (between 3 and 30)
(?<![.-])          # no - or . at the end
$                  # end of string

All stream items that are not conforming to these rules must be ignored by the stream parsing application. If a publisher announces a new alias the old becomes available to be re-assigned. Applications must be aware of the fact that address-alias mappings may change over time.