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Comment by siculars | Hacker News Reader

I'd call myself a developer and a "computer" expert, especially relative to 99% of the people I know in real life. I've also been in the bitcoin game a long time. I run full bitcoin and monero nodes. Absolutely none of this is easy and frankly, at times it can be absolutely terrifying considering the sums of real dollars you may be transferring. To think that the market cap of Bitcoin and Crypto in general is where it is is actually shocking considering how absolutely UNfriendly the entire endeavor is from step 0 to actually buying, selling, transferring coins or buying goods and services.

When using cryptocurrency becomes as easy as pumping gas or sending an email or depositing a check - watch out, because it inevitably will become that simple. It will make the run up we've seen in 2017 seem absolutely darling. I'm certain the usability will come. Personally, I'm waiting for Square Cash to figure it out and then integrate with Twitter.

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I don’t know, for buying and selling Coinbase seems to be pretty user friendly. You can sign up for an account, link it to your bank account and start trading in minutes. Not sure how much easier it could get.

True.

But even so, the average Coinbase user's reaction to receiving their first Bitcoin is "Now what do I do with it?"

Both of my parents had this reaction. And the only use they've found so far is to gamble it on altcoins like they have in the past with penny stocks!

So the whole "transferring coins or buying goods and services" part has a looooong way to go.

> And the only use they've found so far is to gamble it on altcoins like they have in the past with penny stocks!

Which is really all cryptocurrencies are good for at the moment. Nobody in their right mind would use anything so volatile to buy/sell goods and services.

I used to tell people this when they ask me how to buy Bitcoin but then one day I helped a friend and no, Coinbase can be really unfriendly sometimes. We tried to verify his account 20 times and even though it sometimes said it was OK it actually wasn't. The page kept bugging out, getting stuck and all kind of nonsense. In the end we had to give up.

Fwiw, this was outside the US.

Same experience here. It tooks me DAYS to have a working coinbase account. Their process was a pains in the *, verification a nightmare.

Please make sure you take your coins off of Coinbase (or any other exchange) as soon as you can. Here's a talk by the venerable Andreas Antonopoulos on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt-zXEsJ61U

tl;dr - Exchanges go bankrupt

Right, I was gonna say that Coinbase is currently the best way to buy and sell coins today. I can say that as I have accounts on a number of exchanges. Still, Coinbase does not let you know that they also operate GDAX.com, where you can "make a market" and buy/sell for no fee. A buy/sell on Coinbase is basically a market order on GDAX.

The problem there is that you can't do instant transactions. You need to transfer cash, wait for that to be received by GDAX, then trade. Unless you keep cash on gdax/coinbase, you will still need to buy coinbase if you are buying an unexpected dip.

Navigate to coinbase.com, scroll to bottom: Products - GDAX. Hardly a secret.

Sigh... "You just had to go the basement bathroom past the sign that says beware of the leopard!" (To misquote Douglas Adams). I had to have a friend tell me that there's seamless transfer between yhr 2 systems, if they really wanted to let you know they would've had this trading capability as no. 4 in their "Getting Started"..

I am betting on Dash Evolution.

(Now I will be probably downvoted to hell as usual because mentioning Dash, but Dash Evolution is absolutely ontopic when it comes to user friendly crypto: That project is the biggest effort to make cryptos user-friendly in the industry.)

Can you give some examples why you feel that way?

Dash has a clear vision to be a payment-focused cryptocurrency, and has important features to achieve this: relatively high transaction throughput (2MB blocks at every 2.5minutes (obviously they have a roadmap to further improve this)), private send, instantsend option. It has an actually working treasury system, and the whole project is pretty well grounded on earth (vs. some extremely specualtive cryptos like IOTA). The evolution project is about using the already existing masternode network to provide features that up to now mostly centralized services provided on top of the blockchain. People will log into their wallet, can reference their freinds by name instead of adresses, they will have contacts ,etc... all in a decentralized system of masternodes. I don't think any of the big cryptocurrencies have such a vertical integration in their system. Also I like the people in the Dash Core team: Ryan Taylor (CEO), Chuck Williams (UX), Evan Duffield (CTO). They have a quite big chance to become a cryptocurrency actually used for payment instead of only as a store of value.

Thanks for the reply. I’ll probably take a look at Dash.

> all in a decentralized system of masternodes.

That's assumed and not proven. There's a lot of dislike for Dash on r/CryptoCurrency for a reason. One of the biggest issues is where its creator, Evan Duffield, instamined/premined a ton of coins "by accident" and didn't start over for a fair launch. In the first two days, he mined 1.9 million coins (10% of the supply).

Refunds and chargebacks without escrow need to also be trustworthy and easy, too.

I believe a Bitcoin debit card would do everything you say... But if someone skims my card at the pump and takes all my bitdimes, I want that to be a resolvable problem. The thing I fear most about mainstreaming Bitcoin is buyer protection.

I use the TenX debit card. You can stock it up with Bitcoin and pay everywhere where VISA is accepted.

Super nice to impress your friends by buying burgers with yesterdays gains :P

But how much was that burger (the next day)?

That doesnt matter as I consumed it and had fun doing so!

Have you never used cash?

Do you carry all your wealth around in cash and hand it to the cashier for them to take their part?

Do you only use a hot wallet for all your coin? Do you keep your savings in your checking account?

I'm not the guy you replied to but:

> Do you only use a hot wallet for all your coin?

No.

> Do you keep your savings in your checking account?

Yes! :)

Moving coins manually between a hot and cold wallet is a hassle and what I would consider a significantly worse user experience than what exists today.

Ok, well if your checking account is breached and funds withdrawn you'll be fighting with the bank to get them back while unable to pay your living expenses. It's pretty risky.

Get a second account, even if it's low / no interest, and put the bulk of your money there. That way if your checking account is emptied the attacker only gets your spending money. Don't spend directly from the second account; move money from the "savings" account into checking regularly (monthly by scheduled task if you can't / don't use internet banking, as required if you do). Will also help with budgeting if you have an extra step in making large sums of money available. Not saying you don't / can't budget, just offering experience!

You say that like it isn't fast becoming an option for the wealthy and technologically adept.

Maybe the price is that high in part because the offer is limited by things such as lost bitcoins and unfriendliness of transaction.

Monero is downright user hostile at this point!

They're all terrible. Here's some terrible from Monero:

  [wallet 432JYE]: help 
  ...
  fee Print information about fee and current transaction backlog
  ...
  set Available options: seed language - set wallet seed language; always-confirm-transfers <1|0> - whether to confirm unsplit txes; print-ring-members <1|0> - whether to print detailed information about ring members during confirmation; store-tx-info <1|0> - whether to store outgoing tx info (destination address, payment ID, tx secret key) for future reference; default-ring-size <n> - set default ring size (default is 5); auto-refresh <1|0> - whether to automatically sync new blocks from the daemon; refresh-type <full|optimize-coinbase|no-coinbase|default> - set wallet refresh behaviour; priority [0|1|2|3|4] - default/unimportant/normal/elevated/priority fee; confirm-missing-payment-id <1|0>; ask-password <1|0>; unit <monero|millinero|micronero|nanonero|piconero> - set default monero (sub-)unit; min-outputs-count [n] - try to keep at least that many outputs of value at least min-outputs-value; min-outputs-value [n] - try to keep at least min-outputs-count outputs of at least that value; merge-destinations <1|0> - whether to merge multiple payments to the same destination address; confirm-backlog <1|0> - whether to warn if there is transaction backlog; refresh-from-block-height [n] - set height before which to ignore blocks
  ...
  [wallet 432JYE]: fee
  Current fee is 0.000222060000 monero per kB
  2 block (4 minutes) backlog at priority 1
  1 block (2 minutes) backlog at priority 2 (current)
  1 block (2 minutes) backlog at priority 3
  No backlog at priority 4
  [wallet 432JYE]: set priority 3
  Wallet password: ***************************************

Me and my grandma: Priority? WTF is priority? Why does "priority" set the fee? It's all so bloody terrible. Friends messaging me to buy some IOTA. Guess what? It's very complicated to buy IOTA.

What wallet are you using?

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