As we ramp up to celebrate Monero's 10th birthday, here's an opportunity to get acquainted with Monero ID's - easy and free!
TL;DR: Fill out the form at get.xmr.id/form.html to get your very own stagenet OpenAlias.
OpenAlias is great: You hand someone a simple domain name and their Monero client resolves it to a destination. No copy-paste, no QR-code scanning - just ready to send!
To make your life easier, XMR.ID provides this as a service.
Now with faster activation
Previously, setting up your "XMR ID" required significant manual intervention, that delayed the process more than necessary.
After a broad set of optimizations, new aliases are now typically ready-to-use within 15 minutes.
The new automations repect XMR.ID's design goal of avoiding web-based self-service, thus maintaining the previous level of security.
Wanna play?
Before enabling this new method in production, we will test in on STAGENET - a parallel Monero network that works just like the real deal, but with its funds considered worthless.
If you haven't used stagenet before, this may be a great opportunity for you to not only get acquainted with XMR ID's, but create a risk-free playground for your own experiments!
It takes about 5 minutes. At the end you will have an account that can receive funds at <yourname>.stagenet.xmr.id, filled with some zero-value Monero, ready to be sent around.
To try it, simply fill in the blanks at https://get.xmr.id/form.html (onion). No ninja-skills required - and you may contact me about any issues or inconveniences you encounter.
Hackers welcome
Put your white-hat abilities to the test, fool around a bit, probe and report any faults or security flaws if you want to help harden this part of the Monero ecosystem - or just do a speed-run and get your alias.
Your stagenet-alias
This test is set to run for a week, starting today, but your alias will remain active afterwards.
Contact
Let's chat in our Matrix room #xmr.id:monero.social or message me directly at @f:monero.social.
c/XMRID is our place in town. There's also an email address. You'll probably run into it as you go.
Talk soon, f
You might be providing this service with the best intentions, but, what prevents you from one day changing all of the records to your own address? Or changing a record whenever it is requested from "a-company-that-is-known-to-do-big-monero-payouts.domain"?
Again I am not saying this is your intention, but Monero's purpose is decentralized digital cash and I personally would not use such service for anything except maybe a convenient donation address that you don't expect to get big payout to.
Manipulation of any record would immediately trigger a notification to all affected users, leaving me with nothing but a destroyed reputation.
The most granular use I can think of is telling someone in-person to load your XMR ID on their device and then confirming what you see.
Coupled with a client that stores the result in a local address book - and compares it with the current DNS responses every time - even senders can be sure that they are still working with valid information.
(An extension to the official Monero client supporting this is in the works.)