Bitcoin Will NEVER Gain Mass Adoption (video/podcast)

in #bitcoin6 years ago

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Bitcoin will never reach mass adoption - that's my case here. It's not because there's anything wrong with Bitcoin of itself. It's simply because Bitcoin isn't aiming for mass adoption.

The Bitcoin team isn't focused on mass adoption, and maybe they never were. They're focused on something else - I don't know exactly what, something technical, some kind of engineering miracle. I know they're not focused on mass adoption, because mass adoption comes with user experience. The way you get people to use your tech is to make it easy to use. You start with your customer in mind.

Scroll down to watch and listen to this episode.

Stay Safe

Welcome to Cryptonomics, principles of cryptocurrency and investing. If you are storing hundreds or thousands of dollars of crypto on exchanges, you're putting yourself at risk. Your account could get hacked, the exchange could get hacked. That's why I recommend getting one of these babies - a Trezor. In many ways, it's even more secure than storing your crypto on a paper wallet buried in your backyard. I've been using mine for more than a year and had a great experience with it. You can store more than 500 different cryptos on here. Put your mind at ease, keep your crypto safe with Trezor.

UX is not a priority for Bitcoin

We know that user experience isn't their priority, because we can hear it from the developers themselves. In 2017 when Bitcoin transaction fees were surging, Bitcoin dev Lukejr said "Just pay a $5 fee and it'll go through every time unless you're doing something stupid."

In 2013, developer Gregory Maxwell gave his opinion on the 1 MB block limit which caused the transaction fees to get to that point, saying he wouldn't have joined the project if they didn't have that limit. More recently in October 2018, both Maxwell and developer Jimmy Song advised people to use their credit cards rather than use Bitcoin for a purchase.

We can tell these are people who aren't striving for a good UX, saying these things without apologies. Whatever plans they have for Bitcoin, it's not as a payment platform for regular people. Bitcoin has an established history, it's the oldest project of its kind, and it is tough. I would still say it's the most stable project in crypto, but I'd also say that stable and stagnant are two sides of the same coin.

I like to think about the case of BetaMax vs VHS, the video systems from the 80s and 90s.

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BetaMax vs VHS

Ask some people why BetaMax failed and they'll tell you it was market failure. BetaMax had the superior tech, and buyers just made a bad choice and made VHS popular. BetaMax did have superior picture quality, but users made the right choice. Users bought the product which best served their needs.

BetaMax was so focused on tech that they never bothered to ask what their customers wanted. What they wanted, on the whole, was an affordable system with a long play time. Picture quality was always secondary. BetaMax could only record an hour in its first form. VHS could do two hours, enough for a movie or football game. BetaMax also waited years to add new features like the remote control. And so, people bought the system which gave them what they wanted.

The whole product

This is an extract from an article about BetaMax vs VHS:

... almost no journalists, and no geeks, have ever come across the concept of "the whole product", though it is well known to marketing people. Real people may not be aware of it, but the "whole product" model is an accurate description of the way they buy things.

Let's take a simple example: digital audio tape (Dat). Get someone to compare Dat with a humble C90 compact cassette and they will find Dat to be technologically superior, especially for recording music. However, if you consider "the whole product", Dat is vastly inferior for most people most of the time. This is why people still buy millions of cassettes, while Dat has virtually disappeared from consumer use.

The point is that when someone buys and uses a product, the technological aspects are a small and often uninteresting part of the decision. When you choose compact cassette, you are also buying into a vast infrastructure of capabilities, services and support. These include the availability of cheap cassettes on every high street, cheap personal stereos, and the ability to use the same format for a wide range of applications (personal stereo, portable radio/cassette players, in the car, in your hi-fi stack).

That was Jack Schofield writing for the Guardian in 2003. We don't use cassette tapes any more, but fundamentally nothing has changed. Techies still don't know that there is more to a product than just its specs.

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Go verify your own blockchain

A month ago, I interviewed Juan Galt about why he still believes Bitcoin is the most important project in crypto. Juan told me that:

"It comes from an an American culture, so there's an analogy to the right to bear arms in the Bitcoin world, and that's the right to be able to validate the blockchain itself ... If you can't download a node to a consumer grade computer and run the verification process, you can't actually know the supply is limited."

I respectfully disagree with Juan. if you're nerdy enough to want to download an entire blockchain and prove for yourself that the amount of coins is limited, you're probably nerdy enough to buy specialised hardware to do it. Working the whole project to cater to this small group of people who want to be able to prove the basis of their money on their home computer, is backwards. Regular people don't care about that.

I encourage people to go back and listen to the full interview with Juan so you can hear his arguments and make up your own mind.

Everybody wants a good user experience

Regular people want something easy to use, and to get them to change their habits, it might even have to be easier to use than what they have now. Services like Google Pay, PayPal and Venmo set the standard of modern financial services. Being able to verify the blockchain on your iPhone generally is not something that people have on their mental checklist.

This tech can already be used to send payments cheaply, evading capital controls, and giving an option to people stuck with a hyperinflating currency. There are people suffering out there who could really benefit from digital currency, but they still can't get it because there aren't services that let them access it. Fortunately, some people are working on things like Dash Text, which lets people with feature phones send Dash.

I don't know which project will hit the mainstream first. What I know is, if your project focuses on tech and not people, it will stay in your mum's garage. First and foremost, all tech, all design, all crypto, should be about people. When you care about people, people will care about you.

Important Links

Buy a Trezor and keep your crypto safe
Steve Jobs on UX
Why VHS was better than BetaMax
Just pay a $5 fee
Greg Maxwell 1 MB limit
Credit cards are better
Juan Galt - Practical BItcoin Maximalist

The Episode

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The Bitcoin team isn't focused on mass adoption, and maybe they never were. They're focused on something else - I don't know exactly what, something technical, some kind of engineering miracle.

There is no Bitcoin "Team", you most likely don't understand anything about Bitcoin after saying that.

The majority of influential devs working on Bitcoin want mass adoption as store of value not as a payment system.
Compare how slow and inconvenient it is to pay with physical gold and then how baseless and iffy the digital fiat transfers are and you'll see how big a gap there is to fill.

But why store value in Bitcoin? What makes it so appealing? Id say that even Steem could have that function through powering up even better then BTC.
Anything really can be a store of value and the only appeal BTC has over other alternatives is that its "best known", "biggest"., limited supply.
Once more people start getting into crypto realizing the options available it could easily happen that BTCs appeal might be lost in favor of technologically superior crypto of which there are huge numbers already.

People tend to act as if BTC has some kind of predestined place in the future of money and that place cannot be taken over by anyone.
I dont hold that belief and i think that something that doesnt have a potential utility outside "hodl it might go up/hodl it might not lose value" is something that doesnt have a bright future. It might do well in midterm but without major improvements BTC is almost a burden to Cryptocurrencies and a go to crypto when critics want to spread FUD due to BTCs complete lack of ability to compete in utility with any legacy payment systems.

If STEEM had a bigger market cap (that it deserves) i would even say that it would be a far better store of value long term (if in SP) then BTC, even with the inflation aspect.

The main reason im a huge believer in STEEM is because it has the potential to be "everything".
And by "everything" i mean exactly that. You could actually build a whole society on the STEEM blockchain.
It does sound far-fetched but its really not. Look at what you have right now.
You have artists like me providing entertainment, you have fundraising, games, people offering all kinds of services, buying and selling rl objects, even a bank (of sorts), supportive and active communites that function on-chain, humanitarian efforts and most important you have SBDs and STEEM as the currency. All these things happening on the blockchain.

I respect BTC greatly for what it did but i really cannot see what the appeal is now that i have found STEEM.

I like Steem a lot, though I'd say it's not really ideal as a payment platform at the moment. The way it's structured, it could be difficult to have a wallet app for it that's secure... maybe though.

In terms of user experience, I'd say Steem has the best in the market by now. Even just having usernames instead of crazy long addresses makes a huge difference. Even so, it has a long way to go. Generally, people just won't accept the idea of "yeah, if you lose your keys/password, that's the end."

I cant speak on the security in the broad sense since im not educated enough on the issues. If you gave me an example or elaborated a bit more i could respond.

My comment was more in regards to Steem being the only crypto on the market that actually has society building potential on top of what every other currency offers.
BTC and all others crypto want to "force" itself into the mainstream society while Steem builds one from bottom up and invites individuals to be a part of it.

Steem, Gab, Minds, MeWe, Brighteon, & Bitchute, are doing pretty good. Bitcoin is mostly like buried treasure. Steemit is my favorite. Yeah, trying to force itself into the mainstream is like trying to force a baby to eat.

Who says, Steem, Gabs, Minds, MeWe, Brighteon, and Bitchute, can not become the mainstreem. The Facecrook, Twitter, Pinterest, cartel, banning lots of people, is a major opportunity for us to grow, and work longterm to replace them. As more, and more people awaken, social media websites, like steem, will keep going from strength to strength, with continuous longterm growth.

Yes, Steem is becoming mainstream. A lot of things are spreading. Like they say in V For Vendetta, you can't kill an idea. It's cancer but in a good way. We still got so much work to do to keep it up, but we are making history.

At this point, to many people are afraid of the price going down, I don't worry, its just the record lows, before it increases in price, to 10-12 usd. Infact, I am taking advantage of this low price, to buy more steempower. I, also heard a lot of major announcements, of a lot of big money, entering cryptocurrency, on December 12th 2018. This is a video of

Sure. What I meant was, if you want to use Steem from your phone and spend it, you'll have to have your private key ready to use on your phone. With other cryptos, you can just have another wallet with a small amount of funds in there, but with Steem it's not always so easy to make another username.

Yes, there's definitely a lot of potential to build stuff on top of Steem, and it's brought a lot of newbies in with a UX that's more familiar.

Bitcoin is mathematicaly the safest structure out there. Steem is not near as redundant as Bitcoin. Bitcoin has the lowest complexity. Ppl often think the more complex the better but in crypto-economic-transactionsystems-world its the simpler the better. Its touring incomplete and has the longest track record. It has the best aviability (which is still quite low) but you have the instruments to trade it direct paired to USD or EUR, with STEEM, you simply cant. No custodians will be avaiable for steem --> hance no accredited investors .

Ofshore money are hundrets of billions even trillions with all the hedgefund money, multi-billions are moved every day in forex, they simply dont aim for us and our play money.

Of course steem is far better for our everyday use. Since it has more layers of complexity it is more fragile than Bitcoin, thus it cant be everything. It cant be the robustest crypto-system simply because it is not build for this purpose. Thus it makes no sense to compare it with Bitcoin.

Why do you think your post is a good response to my comment?

because you clearly don't understand the concept of bitcoin. even comparing it to STEEM lol

hehe. :D Thank you for your input.

Fear, uncertainty and doubt. It's a sort of "marketing tactic" or propaganda tactic, where you try to convince people that competing products or companies are inferior or dangerous.

Didn't they use fear to convince people to hate Trump? I'm for free markets, for making government smaller and smaller. It is up to each of us to stop tyranny, increased taxes, regulations, red tape, the swamp, the corruptions, etc. People don't have to like Trump to love freedom. When people awake to the responsibility of taking care of freedom, they abandon their hobbies to fight for their children, their future.

People will still say, Bitcoin will never gain mass adoption, when it reaches $1,000,000 a Bitcoin, I ignore the doom-mongers, and focus on delivering value. I gladly support Trump, and I am a bisexual woman, from the LGBT community. Sure, I may not agree on everything Trump does, I am, no fan of Pence, just Trump, but I agree on the majority of things Trump does.

I am for smaller government and raising money, by alternative means, like the government, buying tons of houses to rent out, to raise revenue for the government. Additionally, the government should get to work, buying airports, water utilities, power utilities, among many other purchasing decisions. The government should then, pass along the budget savings, the government has made, due to raising money by passive income. With the goal being, to lower taxation, with the eventual goal, being that all government functions, are run 100 percent free of taxation, with revenue raised, from passive income, and voluntary contributions only.

Monopolism?

Would you rather have people pay a monopoly, like the government, for their power, water, utilities, or would you rather pick from a variety of free market power companies, water companies, etc?

Solar Power?

Would you rather have an option to maybe buy solar panels for your electricity, or water power, or other options?

Exactly. you beat me to it, it's meant as a store of value.
Bitcoin =gold
enter crypto here = the payment system.

Bitcoin is just the digital gold, no one needs to use it.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your values and how you see cryptocurrencies, XRP and/or XLM will be the digital currency, where BTC stays as digital money

Bitcoin will develop layers that operate as the payment system in the future. There won't be another crypto filling that gap.

Bitcoin as we see it now will be how large transactions take place between businesses/governments/etc as store of value continues to make more sense globally.

With day to day transactions happening in Satoshis on a slightly less secure extremely fast network.

Bitcoin is a 50+ year project that is blowing past expectations in its first decade.

I highlight a few reasons why this is here: https://bit.ly/2RV1vix

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Believe in Bitcoin the Digital Gold, support decentralization

In a round-about way, I think we're actually in agreement here on many points. We're in agreement that they're not working on user experience, or on a payment platform. The point we disagree on is that, you believe it can reach mass adoption without building a user experience, and I believe mass adoption must first include a great user experience. Is that right?

Jesus you still dont get it

This post is pretty much worthless so I am going to make it worth something with................................................... !rabbit

abra kadabra !rabbit

!rabbit

No. What User Experience are you even referring too? The majority of Bitcoin enthusiasts/HODLers/and OGs DON'T WANT TO SPEND THEIR BITCOIN. They want to STORE IT AND GROW THE VALUE.

A user experience can come decades down the line.

Here I explained it a little better for you here: https://bit.ly/2RV1vix

I gave a few examples of what counts as a good user experience in the video. This is good though, because you're not the only one to ask for clarification on that point. Maybe this video ruffles feathers precisely because people don't know what user experience is.

I read your article, but I still don't know why you believe mass adoption doesn't matter. Can you summarise your answer, or point me to the part of the article which explains it?

Also just want to point this out 1 MB block is a security feature:
Don't believe me here words from a BCH fan:

Nothing wrong with bigger blocks but as seen you can't just increase it-it becomes an attack vector. You either cap it or let go up the limit which let blocks grow infinitely. i much support at max 10 MB blocks on bitcoin.

I don't see how that quote from Vin provides support for what you're saying. Can you clarify?

How does bigger blocks become an attack vector?

Assuming you're right and you can't just let it grow infinitely, that points to either a lack of foresight from Bitcoin developers, impotence of Bitcoin developers, or some other structural problem which inhibits development. The block size issue went on for literally years before they implemented SegWit.

this issue was always known in theory. CSW just made it into an attack vector officially. The attack vector is to spam blocks so much it disconnects other nodes thus giving them more power to mine.
there are to ways to slove it make it a limit or make no limit at all and hope for the best.
A block limit makes fees high but not shut down node. In no limit method the node client and your own resources just have to get good

Okay, interesting. Doesn't the fact that you have to pay fees to ensure inclusion prevent spamming blocks? Is this a problem with Dash or with Steem?

yep fees prevent this type of Ddos. Smaller MB blocks make this cost get more expensive thus preventing prolong spamming. Dash might have this problem but their use of masternodes helps them subsidize big blocks. That is why I believe if their is one coin that can do big block it is Dash.
Steem no... due to RCs which depend on your steempower(after the base limit) so the built in spam prevention system is kinda like a collateral based system. the more steempower you have more Rcs(resource credits) you have. Or in the future you can rent out RCs but even then spamming won't work that well.

but, but, holding gold and using it as a payment needs better UX else no "mass" adoption. :(

Gold doesn't have mass adoption. Most people today don't own gold to store value, and they definitely don't trade in it. So what is your point?

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Goldsmith Bankers?

Centuries ago, goldsmiths were bankers, possibly the first bankers ever were goldsmiths and they would store people's gold in their vaults.

Paper Money Receipts?

Paper money were generally the gold receipts. Yeah, so many people may not have gold. But they probably should have gold. A lot of people would keep gold in their basements maybe, if they had gold in the first place.

Bitcoin is kind of like gold in that sense.

Ethereum might be like silver. So, some people are collecting Bitcoin. The popularity & the idea of holding onto crypto gold is spreading around the world.

It's growing.

So, it may not ever gain mass adoption, but it is becoming more adopted than gold, more decentralized than gold, and safer than gold in a variety of ways.

Bitcoin might not ever gain mass adoption, but it's likely that some digital currency will. I hope it's a free, stateless currency, not one controlled by banks or governments.

You know that the dollar is mostly a digital currency, already? The dollar is not a cryptocurrency because it's centralized by the Fed and central bankers. But most money is debt. Most money is theoretical. A lot of dollars are running around through wire transfers from bank to bank and stuff like that. Yeah, may the better cryptocurrency rise and continue to compete against the others. So, all of this is very good. But we are also in the fight of our lives against world banks and others as they have not had this level of competition for like many centuries.

Bitcoin team lol

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.

Ux is important but that not up to Bitcoin core dev. Their job is to make the main blockchain secure. One little screw and bang $ gone.
Their a reason why Bitcoin called the most secure blockchain in the world right now. Bitcoin was built to be Sovereign State resistant and fights to remain such.
Creating a wallet ux is for other bitcoin dev just not the main blockchain dev. There plenty of beautiful wallet out there being worked on. And Ln wallet as well.

Would bitcoin still survive at this point if Blockstream was raided and shut down by some government entity? In other words, are there enough devs outside of Blockstream to keep the project going? I see that company as a form of centralization that creates potential vulnerability. Bitcoin needs to be less reliant on company structures for progress.

yes they are enough dev outside of blockstream...
the rumor that blockstream control bitcoin dev is bc many dev support blockstream goals. But don't work for blockstream.
Blockstream has great power but not to the extent you think. Blockstream has more social power if anything. Blockstream might scare some people but is also trusted by many others...

There is an case study done showing less than 10% of bitcoin core dev worked or held stake in blockstream.

Be interesting to see if any of the cryptos actually do see mass adoption, or if they just lead the way then die out and give all the ideas for the big players that dominate society to emulate and steal the glory...

There is no they in bitcoin, only "us". You're at the very beginning stages of understanding bitcoin, like I was when i first heard of it. You just need to research more and give yourself time. Everything you talked about here is the same thing we've been hearing from newbies since 2011.

This sounds like an ad hominem. Perhaps you can explain where my error is, or what I need to research.

I have been researching Bitcoin since 2011.

Toyota accepts Bitcoin and Amazon will sell you gift cards for Bitcoin, many many more accepting it as time goes on. Maybe Bitcoin will not be yet other cryptos are filling the spaces bitcoin cannot Etherium, Ripple, STEEM...

We need to do our own part..

Well said! Thanks for posting this. It's been my thought for years.

Usability is important. I'm betting on PalmPay.

Where's the "Bitcoin is like Poker" video? I can't wait to comment on that one! It may be a bit long and involved but it's golden advice!

Thanks Michael. I'll have to check out PalmPay.

Bitcoin is like poker is one of the first ones I posted... I've been reposting stuff on The Paradise Paradox YouTube. At first I thought it made sense to start a channel just for Cryptonomics, but now it seems like it was silly because my old subscribers aren't seeing my stuff. Live and learn.

My bad. Regardless, my compliments on some well done work.

No bad to it haha. I'm glad you're enjoying these videos. As you might guess, I put a lot of thought and planning into how I approach Cryptonomics so it's cool that you and others are appreciating them.

Ah at first I found this one PalmPay.co which does look like an interesting project, for finance and loans in Africa. But I assume you mean PalmPay.io, for accepting cryptocurrencies. Interesting how they decided to use BitShares for it.

Indeed. Bitshares is one of those cryptos I don't think most understand the potential of. I'm no expert myself but when it comes to user experience, as you point out, the most usable wins. This is going to be rolling out in Acapulco over the next few months... we'll see how it goes.

DAT’s were the best for recording! B. E. S. T.

Haha. I never had the chance to try one, just heard about them in rap songs.

They recorded so0Oooo SloO00oooww. You couldn’t even see the little wheels in the center of the cassette turning as they were recording. Pristine quality and sound!

Except we had to pay top shelf price for the Dat’s, we could only get them in like 10 packs or something, too, the Dat players, etc.

Good morning from Los Angeles.