(context post by DataWraith)

Can I just butt in with a question on why that is? To me it seems that if Bitcoin uses public-key cryptography to transfer ownership of the coins, it should be a trivial matter to include a short message that is only readable by the recipient.

Hmm - is there any text field associated with an address based transaction? It does make accepting Bitcoins a bit more cumbersome. Would including such a text field as part of the protocol compromise anonymity somehow?

Hypothetically, a short text message could be encoded into transactions by charging, say, 2000-2000.999999 Bitcoins and encoding the text portion in the fractional part of the amount.

Or does that solve a problem that doesn’t exist?

Is there already a protocol in place to say “make me a new address to send BTC to” ?

You can create new addresses all you want.. the way most people are doing this is they generate a new address for the user and display it to them. When payment is received to that address it credits the user. You can just generate a new address for each transaction, like a transaction ID essentially. Link2VOIP automated it all and some others have as well, simply by using the built in JSON-RPC functionality.

Satoshi would have to address the other questions about including messages..

Quote from: DataWraith on May 19, 2010, 07:52:42 PM

Can I just butt in with a question on why that is? To me it seems that if Bitcoin uses public-key cryptography to transfer ownership of the coins, it should be a trivial matter to include a short message that is only readable by the recipient.

Almost but not quite.  Bitcoin uses EC-DSA, which can only do digital signing, not encryption.  RSA can do both, but I didn’t use it because it’s an order of magnitude bigger and would have been impractical.