CashAccounts self-attestation etc.

CashAccounts could benefit from a self-attestation and address retirement protocol.

Let me explain with an example.

Go to:

https://www.cashaccount.info/#lookup

and search for 'rogerkver'. (without the quotes).

At least this is what I saw when writing this. The problem is quite clear.

Two Rogers!
Is one fake? Are they both real? Which one of them to use?

These are the questions a self-attestation & retirement protocol could help answer.

Self-Attestation

General idea:

You link to an attestation of your address (on some other verified service, e.g. Twitter) by sending a message from your CashAccount to yourself to confirm it's really yours.

e.g. I send an arbitrary amount (paying minimal fees) from my CashAccount to itself, but this arbitrary amount carries a message, that includes some data and acts like a sign, saying "Go to <here> to find an attestation that I made that this really is my CashAccount and it's ok for you to use it".

<here> is any URI you decide. It can be a page on your blog which says

"<CashAccount> is me. Feel free to use it to send me some Bitcoin Cash."

Or a tweet confirming the same thing, from an account that people readily identify as belonging to you. Or a read.cash profile which links to your CashAccount. Or a Memo profile or post which confirms your account.

Any place of "verification" that you can dream of, that you choose. Up to you.

Ok, simple!

And to update your self-attestation (e.g. if you want to change the link) simply send a more recent self-attestation message (from your CashAccount to itself).

Retirement

Let's say you want people to know that you're not using a particular CashAccount address anymore.

Similar to an attestation message, you could send a Retirement message (from yourself to yourself) which can indicate to people "this CashAccount isn't really supposed to be used anymore".

Wallets that support the CashAccount protocol could spot the latest attestation or retirement transactions because they're all from-yourself-to-yourself on that CashAccount . Then they could help prevent sending to CashAccounts that users have themselves marked as retired. And they could display the provided attestation URI so that the wallet users can themselves choose whether to trust the CashAccount without having to do a random web search or try to personally contact the owner (who might be a busy person like Roger!).

Anyways, just an idea so far.

I can't see immediately how to fit it into the existing v1.0 CashAccount protocol, but it would be very easy to do a buddy protocol (with a distinct op_return prefix) that provides this information, without impacting the current CashAccount implementation at all. Wallets could add support for such a scheme at their convenience.

Postscript:

To write this article, I even had to confirm that my own CashAccount address was really mine.

Because it was registered a long time ago, and I wasn't sure anymore. I needed to confirm that it was me registering (although from memory I believed that I had registered) by finding it in my own database, with the actual BCH address (bitcoincash:qqjjlkdsamp3j6qpdlfh2dcze4r7tc28mgqjun0vax).

If I had self-attested it with such a protocol as described above, any supportive wallet could probably show me the attestation about that CashAccount that would have settled my (self-) doubt quicker.