[messaging] The Simple Thing

[Tao Effect]

On Sep 26, 2014, at 4:42 AM, Joseph Birr-Pixton <jpixton at gmail.com> wrote:
> You've glossed over the details (of how a user gets his mail->key
> mapping into the blockchain) and then declared it to be simple.
> 
> Cheers,
> Joe

Yes, thanks Joe for pointing that out.

I don't know what details you are looking for, so please ask for them specifically if I do not provide them below.

I'm going to assume you know the details of:

- How Bitcoin's blockchain works
- How Namecoin's d/ namespace works

Those can be found online. The rest of the details are fairly straightforward:

1. Domain details of example.bit are in d/example
2. Following an RFC that does not yet exist but will exist, the JSON in d/example specifies a how mail users are to be queried on it. For the sake of referencing something, let's call this RFC, "RFC 9001". RFC 9001 simply specifies how to ask example.bit for the public keys of any given user that server hosts.
3. User types joe at example.bit in any email client that's using DNSChain [1]

Now, here we have two possible ways of getting the right public key for joe at example.bit. The connection between the client and DNSChain is MITM-proof as per [1]. Either:

a) DNSChain sends the RFC 9001 details to the client, and the client is responsible for querying the user's public key from example.bit.
b) DNSChain is responsible for it, and simply sends the requested user's public key.


So then the question naturally arises: how does this work for .com emails?

Answer: if it is to work in a MITM-proof fashion, .com must be copied over to a blockchain. A proposal for how to do this while preserving the correct owners is in [2].

Kind regards,
Greg

[1] https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain
[2] https://forum.namecoin.info/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1439

--
Please do not email me anything that you are not comfortable also sharing with the NSA.

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