This is a problem generally for most hex encoded public keys but it seems to me that public keys on tezos should be able to have a “nickname” property. So my KT1 address has a nickname (eg @username), which can be used as a recipient address in the transfer function.
Would be even cooler if it were email based or phone number based.
Would def help with adoption.
Lots of cool stuff you could do to associate various tags (nicknames, other network identifiers, etc.) with keys. Look at keybase.io and how that works. I don’t think there’s any need for this to be in the core protocol, and potentially there could be multiple competing namespace providers (although likely one or a couple would be dominant).
This is up to individual wallets to implement. If you use the command-line wallet, “nicknames” have been the way since day 1. So what you are asking for already exists if you use the CLI wallet. Other wallets will have to implement this for you. Suggest feature requests to your wallet maker.
What if I set a “nickname” like “official_tezos_foundation_address”? It will be quite misleading for other users, won’t it?
