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Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2014 21:02:18 +0000
From: Roy Badami <roy@gnomon.org.uk>
To: Alan Reiner <etotheipi@gmail.com>
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User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14)
Cc: bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Stealth Addresses
Precedence: list

> It's not public.  When I say "please pay me" I also say "use this
> multiplier".

Sending a "please pay me" message is really great for business
transactions.

But I think the use case that Peter Todd mentions is actually *the*
most important currently under-addresesd use case:

> With stealth addresses the user experience can be as simple as you
> telling me on the phone "hey! send me that 0.234 BTC you owe me!",
> me clicking on "Send to Alan Reiner (verified by PGP)" (perhaps
> again on my off-line second factor device for a multi-sig wallet)
> and tellling you "OK, sent".

Lots of work is being done on handling consumer-to-merchant
transactions.  BIP 70 does a good job of tackling the online purchase
case, and the work that Andreas Schildbach is doing with Bluetooth and
NFC will improve the options for a payer in a physical PoS transaction
who might not have Internet connectivity on their smartphone.

But relatively little work (that I know of) is being done on
non-transactional personal payments - that is, being able to pay money
to friends and other people that you have a face-to-face relationship
with.

What I want... no need... is to be able to open my wallet, select a
friend from my address book, and transfer the $10 I owe them from the
bar last night.

I don't care - within reason - what process is involved in getting my
friend set up in my address book.  That may well requires two way
communication (e.g. over NFC).  But once it's set up, I should be able
to just select the payee from the address book and send them some
funds.  Anything else is just too complciated.

I don't know if stealth addresses are the best solution to address
this use case, but AFAIK the only current solution to this use case is
to store a long-lived Bitcoin address in the addresss book.

roy