
Bitcoin has a usability problem - abrkn
https://twitter.com/abrkn/status/911179354381574145
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nikcub
This is in need of a disclaimer or at least a bit more transparency.

The poll is part of an argument being made for support of the recent Bitcoin
fork Bitcoin Cash

The user submitting here is OP and he also paid to have the poll promoted on
Twitter.

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abrkn
I am the submitter and author of the post. I run paid ads on Twitter to shill
for cryptocurrency. Ask me anything! :-)

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joobus
The other huge usability problem is the risk of getting hacked. Everybody,
even programmers, didn't write 99+% of the code on the machines they are
using. Even if you manage to go years and years without issue, that 1 time you
get hacked and your coins get transferred out from under you will make you
lose everything and there is no way to get it back. For normies, this is an
even bigger issue.

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zeroxfe
This is no different from early currency -- it was very difficult to protect
from theft, and when you had lots of it, you were an easy target.

I suspect how this will go down is the masses will use banks, who will offer
cryptocurrency accounts with interest and insurance, while the savvy will
continue to manage their own private keys.

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drcross
>It takes ~1 hour and $0.86 to send $1.00 from a SegWit account on @TREZOR.

The same fee will send a 1,000,000 amount which the user will be pretty happy
about. Bitcoin can't be all things to all people. It doesn't really make sense
to store coffee purchases on a global immutable blockchain. Use other coins to
pay for coffee and let Bitcoin be a store of value.

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simias
You say that now but it wasn't always the narrative from the bitcoin
community. It feels more like after-the-fact rationalization than a true
objective. It just so happens that bitcoin's original architecture didn't
scale and now people are trying to figure it out.

And that's perfectly fine but I feel like we're seeing the same thing now with
segwit and the lightning network. It's all unicorns and rainbows until you
realize that in practice it doesn't work as perfectly as you'd have hopped.

What annoys me is that all these issues could always be anticipated even using
some rough "back of the envelope" calculations. But there's no place for
constructive criticism of bitcoin in the community so the problems are only
faced when you really can't ignore them anymore, and then everybody says "well
duh, it's obvious that wouldn't work" like you just did.

I fully expect that we will see the same thing for segwit and the lightning
network when it'll turn out that the pipe dream of "everybody opens channels
left and right" will fail to materialize and some alternative, probably more
centralized architecture will take its place. It's not necessarily a bad thing
but I wish there was a place where this could be discussed without being
immediately called a shill and a traitor to the cause.

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zeroxfe
> What annoys me is that all these issues could always be anticipated even
> using some rough "back of the envelope" calculations.

Hindsight is 20/20\. Almost no one could have predicted that Bitcoin would be
this big.

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grubles
This is a silly submission and pretty deceiving. Someone sending me $10 in
Bitcoin only spent $0.06 in fees. And it was via satellite [0].

[0][https://twitter.com/adam3us/status/899410638371524609](https://twitter.com/adam3us/status/899410638371524609)

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econner
I don't really understand their tech yet but I believe Lightning is working on
a solution to this problem:
[https://lightning.network/](https://lightning.network/)

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MrBlue
LN is years away.

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flyingfences
LN works; integration into mainstream wallets is months away.

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KasianFranks
One of the most significant rises in cryptocurrency will come when the user
experience, including on-boarding, is made close to frictionless for the
average consumer.

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mmjaa
What, do you think, is key to on-boarding in crypto?

I rate:

1\. Basic, fundamental understanding. This is hard! 2\. Representation - i.e.
education of the user through the interface. 3\. The Status-Quo'ers.

#1: The words are not commonly representable by modern human vernacular.
Crypto's hard to explain, man! The basics have to be really, really virile.

#2: If I have to type in a longass number, you lost me. If I have to type in
_any_ number, its a losing game. See #1.

#3: Nothing beats cash in terms of usability.

On-boarding of ¥ € $ == ∄

On-boarding of web/app/&etc. == ?

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pavel_lishin
> _What, do you think, is key to on-boarding in crypto?_

Convincing someone they need bitcoin.

I have no idea how to buy bitcoins. I guess I could find an exchange, or I
could also go to the Bitcoin ATM at my local Thai place. (Seriously. No idea
why.) But I apparently have to provide my driver's license to exchange cash
into crypto-currency.

What? I'm not putting that into a random machine. That's insane. I don't have
to provide identification when I'm exchanging Euros into Dollars at the
airport, why do I have to send off all this valuable information to a random
person through an ATM over a god-knows-what-kind of connection?

Great. I've just jumped through hoops, and for what? What am I supposed to buy
with it that I can't buy with cash or credit? It seems to me that about the
only thing I can do with it that's useful is move a large sum of money,
relatively cheaply - and if I happened to buy the bitcoins from a guy in a
parking garage, I might even be able to do it with something approaching
anonymity - assuming I never, ever, ever make a mistake.

So how do you convince, say, my mother or my grandfather that they need
bitcoin?

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mmjaa
I just go to the supermarket and buy a Bitcoin card, for 20eu, and use it
immediately to buy things on the Internet.

Its just there, right next to the iTunes credit, the Amazon credit, the Google
Playstore credit, etc. Little cards that I get .. approximately .. 20 minutes
of physical time with, before I discard them and just get the order placed.

Its hard to deal with that, usability-wise, but I guess you have to be in an
"expanding market", like midde-Europe/close-to-Russia to appreciate how weird
it is to just buy Btc at 7/11,Billa, and use it to ship stuff from China.

Edit: i.e. I don't really wanna do it with Euro/$ no more, because Btc. in
China is a value proposition...

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jacek
I would really like links to twitter posts not be common on HM. How can you
have a good discussion on 140 characters?

