Bitcoin has a usability problem
twitter.com
twitter.com
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.
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.
Cash has a huge usability problem in that if I carry ten thousand dollars' worth in a grocery sack, someone will eventually snatch and run.
So don't store a ludicrous amount in a single wallet.
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.
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.
Hindsight is 20/20. Almost no one could have predicted that Bitcoin would be this big.
What exactly is the reasonable cutoff for when I should use Bitcoin or not? How would I know? How frequently does that change?
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. == ?
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?
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...