Bitcoin wallet JSON

BitcoinWallet.com, a domain that you’ll remember sold for $250, 000 back in February of this year, is now open for business.

Price Givens, who identified himself as a founder, seems to have introduced the new site to the bitcoin community just two days ago via a thread on the forum BitcoinTalk.org.

My name is Price Givens and I’m a founder of bitcoinwallet.com. I’d like to present bitcoinwallet.com to the community with these features:

1. Replacing traditional public addresses with a simple user name. My bitcoin address (along with my alt coin addresses) is price.bitcoinwallet.com.

2. A simple JSON API that allows developers of third party apps to systematically discover the public addresses (for all coins) of any user based on their user name.

When the sale of BitcoinWallet.com initially broke, the site CoinDesk among others reported that it had been purchased by Austin, Texas entrepreneur Alex Charfen. It is not clear if Givens is a partner of Charfen, whether they are co-founders together, or whether the domain changed hands since the original sale. The domain is now under whois privacy.

When it comes to bitcoin, I am a relative novice, but I do believe there is something uniquely interesting of note here. If I’m not mistaken, what BitcoinWallet.com has done, is essentially apply the logic of DNS to a bitcoin walleting system.

DNS as you know, is the system that allows unique numeric identifiers in the form of IP addresses to resolve to easy to remember domain names. In point 1 from the quoted forum thread above, Givens seems to indicate that BitcoinWallet.com is the first to allow what had otherwise been unique numeric wallet identifiers to resolve to friendly subdomain names.

Having not delved too deeply into bitcoin before, I am not familiar with other bitcoin wallets, but it does sound like this is quite a radical, albeit elegant, innovation.