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reserved addresses

Joshua Thijssen edited this page Mar 15, 2021 · 2 revisions

Because all address and organization accounts are free for all, we must make some kind of provision to make sure the "real" account users can take their names. For instance, Microsoft (the company) should be able to register the microsoft! and @microsoft! organizations. In order to make this happen, we check the top-500K domains from Alexa. If an account or organization matches a domain in this list, you need to do additional steps in order to prove you are actually the "owner" of that address.

If your name is on the "reserved" list, you need to add your public key fingerprint to a domain DNS entry.

For instance, the 'linux!` account maps to the Alexa top domains:

  • linux.no
  • linux.or.jp
  • linux.cn
  • linux.com
  • linux.org
  • linux.it
  • linux.org.uk
  • linux.org.au

This means that in order to register the account, you need to add your public key fingerprint (will be displayed when creating with bm-client), to the DNS entry of ANY of these domains.

With this system, we make the following assumptions:

  • most favorite and popular names will match a popular domain name.
  • when multiple TLDs are used for popular domains, most of these domains match the same organization or user (ie google.com and google.nl).
  • Names not matching a top Alexa domain is not considered a direct popular name and is free to use by anyone.
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