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RE: Bitcoin Will NEVER Gain Mass Adoption (video/podcast)
Not sure if I agree. Bitcoin is about security. This is not move fast and break things territory. Maybe users wont care about security, but the will care when their money is lost. I think there is enough room in this space to have very conservative projects such as bitcoin and more experimental ones.
My case isn't about whether they move fast or slow, my case is about which direction they're moving. They're not moving towards user experience now, and they haven't been for a long time.
You're also phrasing this as if you have to sacrifice security in order to get user experience... Is that true?
I agree with your statement and analysis overall. Bitcoin tries to be very conservative. In the question of blocksize, keeping it small means more people can verify and that increases security. I dont think with current technology you can have fast cheap transactions that are secure and I like the decision to keep blocks small. The situation is a classical trilema, choose two out of security, speed and price. You cant have all. But I also like that there are others that have bigger blocks. We are still experimenting very much and diversity is great.
Maybe bitcoins approach is not the winning idea, but maybe other chains will suffer attacks in the future that are not possible in bitcoin and people realise that we need as many nodes as possible.
On many other topics we do not have such a trilemma and huge advances in user experience are possible. I think the problem is that the btc people are very theoretical and dont have the skills to deliver good user experience. People that are designing UI on the other hand dont know how to participate. There is a lot of opportunity, but it is difficult to make money and enter that space.
It does increase security, but I do think that Bitcoiners are obsessed with security. It wasn't that long ago that banks ran on a simple double ledger system, where the bank had a ledger and you had a copy in your chequebook. By today's standards, I'd say that's clearly not secure enough. But I'd also say Juan's statement about everyone being able to verify the blockchain on their home computer is going too far - it's limiting the blockchain to the slowest runners in the race. It would be like a video editor developer saying they're going to make sure their software runs on the least powerful device, thereby sacrificing all the benefits of specialisation.
Thanks for your respectful and thought-provoking comments, they're much appreciated.
That bc Bitcoin does not plan to scale by it main layer.
Specialization is decentralization. It will happen to any system but the key it to make it low.
You asked "You're also phrasing this as if you have to sacrifice security in order to get user experience... Is that true?", and I wouldn't presume to answer that question, as phrased, because I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "user experience"
But I will state unequivocally that security and convenience are opposite ends of a sliding scale. More secure is less convenient, and more convenient is less secure. You cannot have both. As Tycho Brahe (the Penny Arcade dude, not the astronomer) put it, "every avenue of convenience for the user is also a vector of exploitation".
There is no hardware solution to this conundrum, and there is no software solution. It is simply a law of the universe. The only working solution is compromise; you set that slider somewhere in the middle and hope for the best.
Yes, I see your point. I'm going to think that one through more thoroughly. Right now, where do you think the slider is sitting with Bitcoin?
I did try to give an explanation of what I meant by user experience, with a few examples and also with the extract from Schofield's article about "whole product". I'm going to think more about what constitutes a good user experience and maybe do a video about it, as it's apparently not as straightforward as I thought.
Thanks for your insightful comment.