
Design Thinking for Blockchains - umitakcn
https://designforblockchain.net/
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tomglynch
Users don't care if the database behind instagram is mysql or couchdb. Users
don't care if a site uses php or node.

So why are we telling users they are using blockchain tech? And forcing them
to hold their private keys?

Blockchain should be implemented behind the scenes to increase user
experience, in a way that improves the overall technology. Until this occurs,
we won't see mass adoption of blockchain.

~~~
buildbuildbuild
I get the sentiment, but believe you’re missing a big part of a user’s draw to
blockchain tech: its novelty.

Designers: don’t let a new tech’s unique place in time be lost. Don’t look
down on a technology or its fans based on their current manefestations. This
technology will only be new once. It’s okay if early adopters are attracted to
the risk. Be honest, but let everyone explore and discover along the way. We
are figuring this all out as we go along.

~~~
ckastner
> This technology will only be new once

This technology is decades old, and the fact that you consider it novel
indicates that it can actually be new more than once.

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Animats
A blockchain is an immutable distributed ledger. That's all. If you have a
problem for which an immutable distributed ledger is useful, and there's no
one you can trust, then a blockchain may help. So far, there are not many of
those.

As for programmable applications on a blockchain, see this list of successful
"dApps".[1] They're mostly gambling. The top Etherium application is
CryptoKitties. The big problem is that any application which relates to the
real world needs reliable info from the real world, like "did it get
delivered". That means trusting some data source. In which case a blockchain
doesn't help much.

Most blockchain applications involve empowering something illegal somewhere.
First it was drugs, then it was getting money out of China. The binary options
crowd had an ICO, but the system never came up. There's proposed "blockchain
FOREX". All gambling, really.

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/7s81tu/successful...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/7s81tu/successful_dapps/)

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thisisit
> One of the most significant obstacles against blockchain and cryptocurrency
> products from entering daily lives is bad user experiences.

I think the biggest obstacle is the use-case for blockchain. Unfortunately,
most of the articles written in favor of blockchain solutions don't cover the
why and hows and instead directly go for buzz words like trustless,
decentralization etc. Case in point about banks:

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2018/04/21/bitco...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2018/04/21/bitcoin-
banks-and-a-whole-lot-of-fud/#190ac47521f1)

So I am really looking forward to a curated list of well-written articles on
the use cases for blockchain.

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QML
Blockchain is a technology – and as with all technologies, it should be
abstracted away from the user. The majority of people don’t care about words
such as “trustless” or “decentralization”; those are essentially meaningless.
They need tangible benefits such as lower fees. Not sure why people in the
cryptocurrency space don’t understand that.

~~~
umitakcn
The intention of the better design for products. Products also should be
abstracted away from the user?

~~~
QML
How is designing for blockchain different from designing for fintech?

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eksemplar
“Block-chain needs service design to succeed”... isn’t the whole point of
service design that you enter a project without fully knowing what you’re
trying to solve and then figure it out a long the way?

I work digitization, so we digitize things, typically. There is a town in
Denmark with a design school called Kolding, they did a digitization project
with service design, that ended up with a cardboard sheet for citizens to keep
track of their case history and a less noisy waiting room because service
designed showed them that was what their citizens needed if the goal was to
reduce stress in the case working of long term sickness. They didn’t go into
this project expecting to do a non digital solution, like expecting something
to save blockchain, but that’s what they ended up with through service design.
It’s since improved their case working and citizen recovery immensely by the
way.

Anyway, I find it interesting that people keep pushing for block chain. The
largest municipality in Denmark has run some POCs on it, and even though we’re
the public sector where it makes sense to have public records, blockchain
aren’t the most efficient way to do it because we need to control the network.
We can’t risk a mining farm taking over 51% of the workload and we certainly
can’t defend even having a proof of work in a world that’s destroying the
climate.

So we’d need to control the nodes anyway, and then it just doesn’t make that
much sense. It may make sense for a company like Maersk who can share nodes
with partners, but despite sitting on a sector which has a lot of public
databases, like the land registry or ownership records, there just isn’t that
much of a use for blockchain tech.

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Animats
Now here's a "blockchain" example which could have been useful, but it's just
another "coin" and a lot of hype.[1] The idea is to have a DRM system for
assets in virtual worlds, which might be useful if VR ever gets anywhere.

When I heard about this, I thought, "they're going to use this to make assets
portable". A game/VR/virtual world asset is basically a file, which has to be
decrypted to be useful. It has a creator, who owns the IP rights, and an
owner, who owns the copy. Currently, such property is slaved to a single
game/VR/virtual world, and the owner can't move it to another one.

Think of a user A wanting to move an encrypted graphical asset created by
creator B from Facebook Places to Apple's VR world. Creator B has to approve
of portability between the two worlds, and user A has to request the transfer,
but Facebook Places has no say, because they don't own the asset.

Now that's what I thought High Fidelity was doing. Nah. It's just another
token with a complex backstory that doesn't do much. They're talking about a
way for creators to prove ownership. All you need for that is a cryptographic
time-stamping service. Those already exist. When you create something, you
take the hash of it and get that time-stamped. Now you can show priority. No
blockchain needed.

[1]
[https://blog.highfidelity.com/tagged/blockchain](https://blog.highfidelity.com/tagged/blockchain)

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apo
_One of the most significant obstacles against blockchain and cryptocurrency
products from entering daily lives is bad user experiences. It is extremely
difficult to figure out for someone who isn’t tech-savvy._

This has nothing to do with "blockchain."

It has everything to do with public key cryptography. Managing private keys is
a royal pain for ordinary people. Yet every block chain secures its users
assets with the same basic technology.

Users detest managing private keys so much so that they'll obligingly turn
over their digital assets to bank-like institutions (Mt. Gox and a cavalcade
of others who rarely get mentioned). In so doing users undermine the original
censorship-resistant value proposition on which legitimate block chains are
based.

If you want to make block chains more usable, focus on making public key
cryptography more intuitive.

~~~
tomglynch
I agree - this is the basis of the issue. Though there's no apparent solution.
Using passwords is inherently less secure. What are the other alternatives?

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deevolution
I would suggest a higher contrasting color for the sub titles.

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mychael
A site about design that uses a blue font on a black background. The irony.

