User experience and brand are the key to actually gaining the traction and a user base. And this does not mean nice colors, this means thinking from the onboarding steps of how you get the app, how do people recommend it to each other, how do people get support when they get stuck, how many new concepts people have to learn to use it, how many manual interactions are required to use it, etc.
Each added friction prevents a fraction of all users from successfully onboarding.
Now we will have to wait to see how it works out with Fedimint or with StandardSats, but the thing to highlight with Fedimint and especially Fedi is that it has multiple good things going for it:
  • It pushes the setup to have at least 3 guardians (it doesn't sound like that StandardSats has any suggestion or even a default for this. Defaults matter.).
  • It makes it clear that you are selecting a person/group (not some online service) during onboarding
  • According to Obi, it will be provided on Umbrel, Nodl, etc.
In the end... Fedimint is one step better than centralized exchanges, but is strictly not better than you taking custody over your coins. It definitely introduces risk of rugpullers starting mints - so that has to be taken into account.
It pushes the setup to have at least 3 guardians
Single operator runs Standard Sats Software. There is a problem yes. But there is no reason to think that it is easier to select group of guardians instead of one.
It makes it clear that you are selecting a person/group (not some online service) during onboarding
Sure. What guarantees that the group isn't the same entity?
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It seems that the plan is to build social guarantees for that - in the UX it will pushing users to only join mints where you know the members of the guardian group from previous social connection. (I'm guessing this based on the interview with obi fwiw)
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