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Get an alias

See Aliases for what an alias is and how it resolves to a wallet address. This page covers the sithbit alias get command.

sithbit alias get <alias>

Resolves an alias to the wallet address it currently points at:

sithbit alias get john_doe

Note: lookups are case-insensitive by construction — the alias is lowercased before it’s hashed into the account’s address, the same as at creation, so John_Doe and john_doe resolve identically.

Resolution is domain-blind: any @domain suffix is parsed off and ignored, so john_doe, john_doe@sithbit.com, and john_doe@anything.example all resolve to the one global john_doe. No domain authority can claim a local part it does not hold — see Aliases.

See Closing accounts for how to close an alias and reclaim its rent.

Discovering a recipient’s encryption key: the cert keyserver

Before anyone can seal mail to a SithBit address they need the recipient’s published X25519 key. The account API exposes a public lookup for exactly that, with the recipient identity in the ?email= query parameter:

GET /v1/chain/cert?email=alice@acme.com

It is public and unauthenticated — deliberately, in the spirit of PGP keyservers (HKP) and Web Key Directory (WKD). Everything it returns is already readable on-chain by anyone, so gating it behind a login would add friction without adding privacy. Give it any recipient identity — a wallet address or an alias, with or without a domain suffix — and it resolves that identity to a wallet (composing the same domain-blind resolution as alias get above), then returns that wallet’s published encryption key.

Two response cases matter:

  • Empty key, 200 OK. The recipient exists but has published no delegated key. This is not an error — a sender seals straight to the wallet address itself (see Mailbox Keys and sealed-box encryption).
  • Unknown recipient, 404. No wallet resolves for that identity at all — there is nobody to seal to.

Because it is a convenient public surface over on-chain data, it carries a threat-model note; see the discovery keyserver is a public enumeration surface.