If someone asked me to describe an NFT, I’d probably say domain names are a form of NFT. People sometimes spend a lot of money to get that perfect name. And so my thought goes, if beam can do NFTs, why can’t we also have payment usernames, as they are also a form of NFT? Unlike domain names, there’s no need to renew or lose it.
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Yes, something like ENS domains for Beam is a good idea.
Privacy by default is a great idea, but we shouldn’t force people to be invisible if they don’t want to be.
The problem with ENS (or used to be anyway) is that it points to a single account address which is no good for privacy at all.
Beam is designed in a way where you can have multiple addresses (some permanent and some temporary). At least I think so…
Ironically, the paynym system is probably the best, and that’s with bitcoin.
Yeah, I don’t know exactly how it would be implemented but maybe tied to the offline Max Privacy feature i.e. a username is stored alongside that address.
I’ve just done a quick test. I copied a regular beam address and it was 466 characters long. I then displayed it as a qr code and tried to scan it. On a modern phone it worked but an older phone was unsuccessful. I feel this is very important. I had thought of displaying a beam qr code inside a video but now I will probably have to direct people to a website, which adds unnecessary friction.
if the Beam wallet added the ability to use App URIs, you could make the QRCode represent something like BEAM://jfdsfsdjifdosjfj483j4389fjrejgj
Then when someone scans the code, it actually opens up beam wallet and even inserts the address in the correct spot.
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Oh, perhaps like IPFS?
Nope, not like that. Beam Wallet would define a custom URI for its app like so: Android / iOS - Custom URI / Protocol Handling - Stack Overflow
more on iOS: Apple Developer Documentation
more on Android: Create Deep Links to App Content | Android Developers
Then Beam wallet users can share their receiving address with the prefix beam:// and when their friends click it, it opens a beam wallet and populates automatically
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I’m just being slow but I still don’t understand where it’s obtaining the long receive address from, unless you mean like BIP70.
You don’t know how to find your receive address in the beam wallet? Have you used a crypto currency at all before?
lol, ok nevermind 
You are not slow… everything you wrote here makes sense, it is just that the proposal from @tally didn’t solve the issue you mentioned at all… namely privacy loss due to address reuse. Adopting a URI scheme solves a different issue.
The paynym system mentioned earlier is an improvement on the older Stealth Address proposal. Essentially the recipient is identified with some long string of digits which represent information needed to construct a one-time public key. The sender’s wallet uses that info to pay funds to a pubkey which is always unique… this prevents some address => user heuristics.
Monero only supports this type of send, so all transactions are to a unique destination – there is no address reuse (in the bitcoin sense) possible.
Additionally, because the Paynym / Monero “stealth address” is fixed, there is a UX benefit in that a user can treat this like a static address and just print it / post it on a website without privacy loss. Paynym further simplifies this with a username => key lookup system. Monero uses OpenAlias.