Making Blockchain human, part 1: How IOV is making exchanging values as easy as sending an email

Simplifying blockchain with a human value address

Most of us have a simple email address. At work, it’s most likely firstname.surname@company.com and at home, we usually register our own name @searchengine.com if we can. We may spice things up by including numbers, underscores or even the name of our favorite soccer team, but few people stray too far into the weird and obscure.

The point is that our addresses are easy to remember. Both for us and for the people writing to us. We handle dozens of emails in our daily lives: according to a 2017 report by Templify, the average employee sends around 40 emails and receives well over 100 during the working day. So we need those addresses to be memorable.

But imagine if they weren’t. Imagine if, instead of addresses like johndoe01@gmail.com, our addresses read something like this:

1BoatSLRHtKNngkdXEeobR76b53LETtpyT

A nightmare, right? Every time you needed to use a new email address, you’d have to check it several times as you copied over to make sure you didn’t miss a character — and then check it several more times once you had entered it into the address field. The whole process would take minutes, rather than the seconds it should take — and just one small error would send the message bouncing back, forcing you to start all over again. There’d be no way for us to share our email addresses verbally, and sending group messages would be a feat of ingenuity akin to solving a Rubik's cube blindfolded.

So basically, we wouldn’t use email at all.

This is the problem that befalls blockchain users. The address you see above is a typical blockchain address — a random sequence of alphanumeric characters with no pattern or mnemonic aid. Every time we want to make a cryptocurrency transaction using blockchain, we have to enter a sequence like this for the recipient.

This leads to a huge amount of money being misdirected. Research shows that over 10% of all blockchain users make a ‘wrong address transaction error’ at some stage; given that around $3 billion is traded every day in bitcoin alone, and there are over 1,000 other cryptocurrencies out there, this is a huge amount of money being sent to the wrong people.

There are also security concerns. Many people use copy-paste to shortcut their way through the address nightmare, but this simply plays into the hands of hackers, who have created a form of malware to infiltrate users’ clipboards and use an address owned by the hacker before paste.

In fact, the website Bleeping Computer recently discovered a clipboard hijacker that was monitoring over 2.3 million Bitcoin addresses.

Yet, more than the lost money and the security concerns, the complexity of blockchain’s address protocol is stunting its user growth. Blockchain can’t expand beyond its core base of highly technical experts and reach the masses until it makes its basic function, the exchanging of digital assets and value, simple and pain-free. People expect their interactions with technology to be as simple as using email, and they won’t become evangelists for blockchain until it reaches this standard.

IOV’s solution

IOV wants to solve this problem, as part of our mission to encourage universal adoption of blockchain. We want to unlock blockchain’s potential to be a new kind of internet, an internet of values rather than data, which is intelligible and accessible to everyone. So we’re striving to make blockchain addresses as simple and easy to remember as emails.

We are building a universal wallet which can trade any form of crypto asset with any other (another key breakthrough), and anyone who downloads the wallet will be able to register their own simple, human-readable address.

So, instead of an address like this:

1BoatSLRHtKNngkdXEeobR76b53LETtpyT

Soon you’ll be able to register something like this:

alice*one.iov

In an instant, the number of wrong-address transaction errors will decline dramatically, transactions will become more secure, and the user experience will be significantly improved. Blockchain will become a technology we can use in our day-to-day lives — whether we’re at work, at home, on the train or in the cafe. We’ll be able to exchange values as easily as we send information.

This breakthrough is made possible by the Blockchain Name Service, or BNS, which aims to bring order and sense to the blockchain universe.

In our next blog we’ll explain the Blockchain Name Service, which is directly linked to our wallet naming protocol — and marks our attempt to create a Domain Name System for blockchain.

To learn more about IOV, visit: www.iov.one.

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