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by ww520 5354 days ago
Just a wild thought. Is there a way to associate an email with a future-created bitcoin account? The goal is to be able to send bitcoins easily to an email address even though the recipient has not created a bitcoin account. The recipient can create an account later on to pick up the bitcoins. This would make it easier to seed wider usage of bitcoins. That's how Paypal started.

I guess this requires a trusted central third party as an eschew to hold the fund for the email recipent and for verifying the recipent's account via email.

2 comments

A paypal-style site can create a new bitcoin account on behalf of the new user.

Then the payer can transfer funds to it, using a transaction that requires signing with keys that only the payer knows and can pass to the payee directly. Bitcoin transactions can also have timeouts and have the inputs locked while the outputs are still floating.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts

Create an account for them, send them the wallet.dat, let them log in and transfer to their own account whenever they want? Or just change password, if that's possible.