There was an outcry a while ago over the efforts of
https://coinvalidation.com/
and some allies of theirs to bootstrap an address registration
initiative. I'm not sure what's going on with that, but I assume it's
still ongoing, and that law enforcement and governments around the
world are creakily getting ready to monitor and tax bitcoin.
Anyway, I just had an intuition that the way of the future is probably
bip32 hierarchical key spaces. Rather than reusing addresses, we'll be
reusing seeds.
So, the "validation" fight is likely to be over public seeds, not
public addresses.
I am not sure what the implications of this are, but I think it bears
thinking about.
For one thing, you could have the illusion of privacy because your
seemingly paranoid business partner gives you a fresh payment address
every time you transact... but he's shared the public seed with
CoinValidation co, so you're not wearing a ski mask but only a fake
mustache.
Seed registration, folks.
It's coming.