I plugged this project into AI and generated critiques:
Issuance is the bottleneck. Treat it as a product. Handles are sovereign after issue. Getting one still depends on an operator who can stall, price-gouge, or vanish. Publish SLAs: max time from pay → staged → committed → cert after 150 blocks. If @bitcoin is the front door, it has to behave like one.
Resolution is the product, not the auction. A name nobody’s browser understands is a collectible. Rank work: Chrome/Brave extension or system resolver, mail without DNS, Nostr clients with NIP-SPACES on by default, one “paste you@bitcoin and it just works” path. Explorer-only success is failure.
Proving centralizes operators. CUDA boxes and 150-block finality mean a few people issue for everyone. Document a public remote-prover option with no custody of keys. If only three machines can commit @popular, say so and recruit more.
Don’t sell the last rung as the first. Certificate ≠ on-chain num. Most users will never do the UTXO step. UI should show three states: issued, published on relays, fully on-chain. Calling all three “sovereign” trains people to stop at the weakest one.
Certrelay privacy is optional and invisible. Public relays can link IP → name. Default Nacho/docs should say: own relay or you’re leaking like a public Electrum server. Ship one-click relay on Start9/Umbrel.
Terminology still fights the user. Space / handle / subspace / num / cert / commitment / staged / published. Pick one glossary and kill the rest in the UI.
Prove it against DNS in a demo, not a white paper. One video: buy handle, lose the operator, still verify on a fresh phone. One video: ICANN-style takedown that Spaces survives.
Burn-auction optics. Burning BTC is clean. It also prices out the people you want using names. Keep the burn. Add a public faucet path that isn’t junk names only, or community Spaces that issue for free with a published queue.
Client diversity before something breaks. One explorer, one Nacho, one @bitcoin store. That’s a single outage away from “Spaces is down.” Second explorer and a non-team operator issuing under a known Space is important.
Client diversity before something breaks. One explorer, one Nacho, one @bitcoin store. That’s a single outage away from “Spaces is down.” Second explorer and a non-team operator issuing under a known Space is important.
I've got about 60 that I've secured so far. Some are for future projects and not intended to be resold. I may add more, but this list is where I started. There are currently 3620 top-level names registered. My platform has the ability to manage the sale of subnames via a delegation option so the name owners retain their ownership. There is no way for me to "reach out" to those owners and offer to help so I have to relay on word of mouth.
If you want a certain name@space_name you might consider opening a name for bidding and becoming the owner yourself. Control your own destiny.
Thoughts: the infra feels extremely buggy, I get several 500s on public facing things like the explorer. The code looks very much vibed. The front page website and the explorer disagreed on both the auction status and the highest bid on @bitcoin (resp 50M and 10M sats.)
Also everyone I see in this thread that sent sats (for what?) needed human intervention to get... an email (!!??) wtf... email.
Worth: I'd recommend caution. But then, I always do that so idk how much that advice is worth
Users publish signed records and certificates there, all verified against the Bitcoin-anchored state root without storing anything on-chain. It's HTTP-based so you can run a Fabric client directly in the browser to find peers and send queries.
the resolver in the hero section of the site is actually a Fabric client, verifying right in your browser: https://spacesprotocol.org/
If you're running a Start9 system, I've packaged it all up for you so you don't have to do any heavy lifting. See the custom marketplace https://registry.spacesops.com It makes running the certrelay as simple as giving it a hostname and Start9 does the rest.
If you run your own certrelay, then your queries are private.
Operators have an incentive to keep the network operational because they sell handles. Users want their handles resolvable too. Luckily, certrelays are small and since HTTP based we can take advantage of caching, CDNs ... etc so quite cheap to run.
it will ignore names that have a dot after the "@" symbol so wont confuse with emails. its been quite reliable. uses iOS OCR apis which are quite good. unless the handle is very poorly written, it should read it fine. You can reattempt the scan by hitting "scan again".
Nostr name, business, brand, personal ID, website pointer, payments label, group chats. Did you see that video Buffrr posted in this post showing of the scan feature? That opens up even more possibilities.
Spaces are human readable names with nobody in the middle. No extra blockchain, no extras token. Bitcoin holds a tiny 32 byte root that so many things can be verified against, it's pretty amazing.
Is the atbitcoin email cleared up or do we have to post here or telegram for manually email once claiming a name to get confirm email with claim codes?
I plugged this project into AI and generated critiques:
Issuance is the bottleneck. Treat it as a product. Handles are sovereign after issue. Getting one still depends on an operator who can stall, price-gouge, or vanish. Publish SLAs: max time from pay → staged → committed → cert after 150 blocks. If @bitcoin is the front door, it has to behave like one.
Resolution is the product, not the auction. A name nobody’s browser understands is a collectible. Rank work: Chrome/Brave extension or system resolver, mail without DNS, Nostr clients with NIP-SPACES on by default, one “paste you@bitcoin and it just works” path. Explorer-only success is failure.
Proving centralizes operators. CUDA boxes and 150-block finality mean a few people issue for everyone. Document a public remote-prover option with no custody of keys. If only three machines can commit @popular, say so and recruit more.
Don’t sell the last rung as the first. Certificate ≠ on-chain num. Most users will never do the UTXO step. UI should show three states: issued, published on relays, fully on-chain. Calling all three “sovereign” trains people to stop at the weakest one.
Certrelay privacy is optional and invisible. Public relays can link IP → name. Default Nacho/docs should say: own relay or you’re leaking like a public Electrum server. Ship one-click relay on Start9/Umbrel.
Terminology still fights the user. Space / handle / subspace / num / cert / commitment / staged / published. Pick one glossary and kill the rest in the UI.
Prove it against DNS in a demo, not a white paper. One video: buy handle, lose the operator, still verify on a fresh phone. One video: ICANN-style takedown that Spaces survives.
Burn-auction optics. Burning BTC is clean. It also prices out the people you want using names. Keep the burn. Add a public faucet path that isn’t junk names only, or community Spaces that issue for free with a published queue.
Client diversity before something breaks. One explorer, one Nacho, one @bitcoin store. That’s a single outage away from “Spaces is down.” Second explorer and a non-team operator issuing under a known Space is important.
Subnames at the following list can be purchased through https://spaceswallet.com today!
https://spacesops.com/getspaces?app=spaces-wallet&format=html
@space @nsite @bitcoinand @thisweekinbitcoin @twib @yeti @bitcoin21 @usdt @usat @cnht @mxnt @xaut @usdc @eurc @zap @pubkey @cyber @swiftyThat's a start. I guess this is new and not many names. Can you add more?
I've got about 60 that I've secured so far. Some are for future projects and not intended to be resold. I may add more, but this list is where I started. There are currently 3620 top-level names registered. My platform has the ability to manage the sale of subnames via a delegation option so the name owners retain their ownership. There is no way for me to "reach out" to those owners and offer to help so I have to relay on word of mouth.
If you want a certain name@space_name you might consider opening a name for bidding and becoming the owner yourself. Control your own destiny.
@optimism what are your thoughts on this? Is it worth getting one?
Thoughts: the infra feels extremely buggy, I get several 500s on public facing things like the explorer. The code looks very much vibed. The front page website and the explorer disagreed on both the auction status and the highest bid on
@bitcoin(resp 50M and 10M sats.)Also everyone I see in this thread that sent sats (for what?) needed human intervention to get... an email (!!??) wtf... email.
Worth: I'd recommend caution. But then, I always do that so idk how much that advice is worth
the explorer is indeed slow and we are replacing it soon. it has not been maintained for months.
the email thing was a small issue that got fixed early on.
How did you test it pre-launch?
testnet4
+1 for new explorer, thank you
How does the lookup work?
Where is that query sent?
Queries are sent to certrelays: https://github.com/spacesprotocol/certrelay
Users publish signed records and certificates there, all verified against the Bitcoin-anchored state root without storing anything on-chain. It's HTTP-based so you can run a Fabric client directly in the browser to find peers and send queries.
the resolver in the hero section of the site is actually a Fabric client, verifying right in your browser: https://spacesprotocol.org/
Now I need to learn how to run certrelay
If you're running a Start9 system, I've packaged it all up for you so you don't have to do any heavy lifting. See the custom marketplace https://registry.spacesops.com
It makes running the certrelay as simple as giving it a hostname and Start9 does the rest.
Any incentive to run a centrelay?
Running a node has privacy benefits.
Also, no claim mail for me too.
If you run your own certrelay, then your queries are private.
Operators have an incentive to keep the network operational because they sell handles. Users want their handles resolvable too. Luckily, certrelays are small and since HTTP based we can take advantage of caching, CDNs ... etc so quite cheap to run.
sent an email. thanks
brilliant if widely adopted
Exactly this, lets make it happen
Is there a demo video on this somewhere?
Wait so you can resolve a spaces handle like grace@key or stacker@news and any @ handle like a qr code by taking a picture of it?
How the heck is that possible? Is it easily confused, what if it was an email like grace@key.com does the app know the difference?
it will ignore names that have a dot after the "@" symbol so wont confuse with emails. its been quite reliable. uses iOS OCR apis which are quite good. unless the handle is very poorly written, it should read it fine. You can reattempt the scan by hitting "scan again".
Hmm, that's very interesting.Physical text pointing to records secured by Bitcoin.
What is this?
https://spacesprotocol.org/
You have a handle?
haha yes of course
Why should I get one of these!
There's a lot of reasons to get a space.
Nostr name, business, brand, personal ID, website pointer, payments label, group chats. Did you see that video Buffrr posted in this post showing of the scan feature? That opens up even more possibilities.
Spaces are human readable names with nobody in the middle. No extra blockchain, no extras token. Bitcoin holds a tiny 32 byte root that so many things can be verified against, it's pretty amazing.
I haven’t send me a link
Here it is:
Handles are finally on mainnet. We've been working on this since 2024.
Quick look at the Nacho app resolving
grace@key, verified on device. The scan feature is neat if you put a handle on a t-shirt:We have built SDKs for JS, React Native, Go, Swift, Kotlin and Rust: https://spacesprotocol.org/docs/developers/sdk/
If you're building a wallet or app and want to integrate, we are happy to help.
Heads up: it looks like purchases on the website eat money. I paid for a handle via lightning and received no instructions and no email arrived.
Did you get the claim code? i will look into this thanks
I got nothing. I got BTCPay server success screen but that's it so far - no email or anything else afaict.
It might also be that your instructions are not enforced via the website and I purchased a handle without using Nacho at all.
i have sent an email with claim codes. let me know if you dont get it. there is an issue with lightning payments flow will fix it thanks.
Got them! Thanks.
Is the atbitcoin email cleared up or do we have to post here or telegram for manually email once claiming a name to get confirm email with claim codes?
all cleared up you will get an email after purchase
Beautiful - thanks
Handles are finally on mainnet. We've been working on this since 2024.
Quick look at the Nacho app resolving
grace@key, verified on device. The scan feature is neat if you put a handle on a t-shirt:We have built SDKs for JS, React Native, Go, Swift, Kotlin and Rust: https://spacesprotocol.org/docs/developers/sdk/
If you're building a wallet or app and want to integrate, we are happy to help.
I think I'm in love
very cool!
👀👀👀👀
I made an account just to say congrats!
finally.. a truly decentralized naming system