our circle of users is relatively small - SN, nostr clients, V4V, IRL tipping, etc.
most of us accept trade offs in UX in order to send and receive our preferred money.
BUT normies & newcoiners will not accept the same UX trade offs. we need to continue to iterate on blends of custody, functionality in order to create more intuitive, usable experiences.
i am interested to see how fedimints might be used to augment some of LN’s… quirks, esp in cases where users are holding < 50k sats in a wallet.
It's a good point and well known issue. I think with time UX challenges will be face ad solved, as you mentioned, we need to iterate more.
Fedimint it's a great community tool and relay on community leaders to onboard normies. Remember that most of the people does not know which technology they are using... just a detail when the experience it's smooth. In the other end, when there's a need, there's a will to learn and use ew tools. Look at cars, no one knew how to drive before... But if you want to go from A to B faster, you'll learn
i do hear your point, but IMO, if we want bitcoin to have more daily use in the west, we need to make the experience OBVIOUSLY better than how payments work currently.
subpar UX is a well-known issue, to be sure, but i personally don't see as much focus on this from western bitcoiners. fundamental bitcoin education is not as important ((in the west)) as creating amazing experiences. this is coming from a marketing/content guy.
i don't want to wait until the USD system goes tits-up for the west to realize the need; i would prefer capitalism to front run that scenario and build products and services with awesome UX. let's get creative!
what make you think that the east use more bitcoin than the west on a daily basis? Do you have any data supporting this affirmation?
what do you mean for subpar UX? any link you could share?
western bitcoiners? What's the difference with the eastern bitcoiners? Ca you expand on this?
You're right, education is not important... it's KEY. You can create the seamless experience but if people are not willing to learn about IT and about the benefits it could offer, it will be a waste of efforts.
what UX experience are you talking about specifically?
I got you, it's hard to market products you do not understand
I'll address the questions in the order that I think will be easiest to understand:
by "western" bitcoiners, I mean folks from the USA, Canada, UK, most of EU etc. like a geopolitical "west", NATO-sympathetic countries, if you will. the difference is that western bitcoiners don't need bitcoin as a monetary system, it is moreso an investment vehicle (store-of-value) at this point in time.
I am actually not making the claim that eastern daily bitcoin usage is greater than western usage -- my assertion is that, in order for western perception of bitcoin to transition from store-of-value into medium-of-exchange (and thus increase bitcoin's utility as money), we need to develop frictionless ways to use bitcoin that are OBVIOUSLY better (to normies, not us) than the incumbent system.
1 & 4. in regards your original question "what are the challenges of spending sats daily" my mind immediately went to all the issues in using lightning on a daily basis. for the specific UX issues, I wrote this article for River a few months back - most of the issues I wrote about have not yet been solved.
I agree and disagree with this point.
Where I disagree: If you create a seamless experience that surpasses a fiat-based experience, you really wouldn't need to educate users. They will simply use the product or service that is most convenient and cost-effective.
Where I agree (with caveat): education is important, but it absolutely needs to be contextually relevant to the subset of users you are trying to educate. Not everyone cares about the same things that hardcore bitcoiners do.
Thank you for taking the time and clearly respond point by point. For me still a bit weird that you differentiate between wester and eastern bitcoiners. True is that there's a fundamental mindset difference between the two sides, but also think there's no need to create this boundary, first because there's probably people that use bitcoin as store-of-value in the east as there's people that use bitcoin as medium-of-exchange in the west.
Moreover, please consider that the technology itself is Made in USA, so there's obviously the first-arrive-first-served here, the language has also been and still being a barrier to access bitcoin as most of the contents still being created i English. There's a lot we can do in so many aspects to help everyone globally understand this technology.
Have the expectation that UX will fix everything is not enough, and sound's like there's an expectation of things working effortlessly for you, instead of taking ownership and make things work with you. The concept of PoW apply globally too, so some effort needs to be done to get some reward, otherwise you'll still use bitcoin as you use fiat. Bitcoin is not only a store-of-value or medium-of-exchange and there's so much to do and learn to understand and apply the other characteristics and values enclosed in it.
For now, we need to be relentless, but friendly and helpful and ask vendors in our spheres. When merchants see enough people asking they will start to see.
Be prepared to share resources for getting started:
Education is key. but the tools I believe make the difference o onboarding merchants. The small ones, have probably some fears facing change. Accounting issues could be one. Just a guess
I live in a small city (300.000 population) and we don't have any BTC friendly business.
But, I know some bitcoiners from here, and they are more focus on staking SATS than spending. So, if we orange pille a bar or any other business no many payments on BTC will occur.
We are still very early! Taxes on spent sats, limited places that accept it, and being so early value is going up exponentially. We get a hard time that people reference the white paper so much as a medium of exchange and gold and silver were used for that, but also as a store of value. I do use a lot of sats on Stacker News easily
That's why - at least for now - I'm using Bitcoin as a savings account instead of a way to buy things. Simply doesn't make sense economically speaking.
As a novice bitcoiner (I'm an ERС-20 follower with 1000 days on the network), I don't understand anything at all, not even the basics of where to find a SATS contract and see quotes (of course, this can be done on СoinMarketCap, but there are three versions of SATS).
Again, I don't want to install a new wallet, and in general it seems more complicated to me than it was in ERC-20 (but I'm not sure).
You seem to be confusing some non-Bitcoin token(s) with the native Bitcoin unit of account. Those tokens are a scam, attempting to fool people who don’t understand that a satoshi is simply the smallest unit of Bitcoin recognized by the base layer.
subpar UX? any link you could share?