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Bitcoin is such a UX nightmare. I finally got my funds transferred to a MultiBitHD wallet, after a lot of effort. I had to pay some service $20 to accelerate

Bitcoin is such a UX nightmare. I finally got my funds transferred to a MultiBitHD wallet, after a lot of effort. I had to pay some service $20 to accelerate my transaction because my other fee of $20 was taking weeks to go through? Now I'm trying to claim my Bitcoin Cash. How do I do this? According to the internet, I need to transfer it to a different kind of wallet first? There's a bunch to pick from, but make sure it's not a scammy wallet. Also I need to extract my private keys with some command line stuff (MultiBit doesn't use normal keys) and run some weird programs to convert them? Then I need to move the funds around again to get it working in a new kind of wallet. Also make sure to do all of this on a clean computer in case these unvetted programs are stealing your keys. Don't forget to pay an extra $40 if you want the transactions to not get stuck forever. Oh and I have to do a bunch of other steps again if I want to get Bitcoin Gold or whatever new fork is going on. I could eventually figure it out with enough time, but how any of this is supposed to be adopted by laymen baffles me. You'd think something with this much developer support would just let you click one button and have it all done.

bdamm 9y ago
Raw cryptocurrency is definitely not for the layman. Really it's for the financial processors. Personally I view the benefit of Bitcoin and its ilk to be the efficiency, transferability and accountability that comes with the blockchain. Those willing to invest time and energy can also carry raw bitcoins in their safe if they so choose, but this is a far way away from being accessible to the layman. Think HTML. How many laypeople know HTML? Yet they get the benefit of the web thanks to all of the developers that have built services using it. Those services wouldn't be available without it.
- CGamesPlay 9y ago
  Can you give an example? I'm having a lot of trouble following your comparison to HTML. HTML is a material which composes documents, and I don't have to understand the material to understand the value of the resulting document. What will bitcoin build that will be useful to me without needing to own bitcoin directly?
  - bdamm 9y ago
    Making intra-bank transactions more efficient is one; the floor of money transfers will be both cheaper and faster. Wire transfers are expensive and can be very slow (sometimes more than a day) for example. Bitcoin being a real transaction mechanism between institutions that is cheaper than wires and faster than wires (works on Sunday!) puts pressure on the banks to either compete or adapt. Another example is enablement of micro-payments (perhaps on side-chains) where conventional money transfers don't scale well - someone, not your (artists) preferred broker, is holding your money until it aggregates up to a transferrable sum. Now there's pressure to make that sum smaller and the transfer frequency greater. And, although not everyone needs this, for those of us that have been in the situation of doing international money transfers, they are a huge pain, unreasonably expensive, and slow too. Bitcoin puts pressure on all this, and I believe we're already seeing companies pop up that offer transfers in your preferred currency but are using Bitcoin behind the scenes to settle the transfers.
sf_rob 9y ago
You're right in your main point that it's a massive pain, but let's talk BTC/BCC. Disclosure: I'm a novice. BCC has "replay protection" meaning it uses a different transaction signing mechanism than BTC so that your transactions on one network cannot be "replay"ed on the other network by a malicious actor. I think people obsessing over keeping your coins in wallets with differing keys is mostly just paranoia. e.g. they want to eliminate threat vectors from their BCC wallet trying to steal BTC or that replay-protection may have bugs discovered in the future (unlikely AFAIK). The clean computer thing is also paranoia. Some folks keep an updated Linux LiveUSB just for their transactions. You can decide for yourself it it's worth the risk. As far as finding a new wallet, a quick Googling makes it seem that MultiBit uses BIP32 to generate keys. This is an open-source keyword based key generator that's used by various wallets, so you have a lot of options for multi-coin wallets, I'm a fan of coinomi on mobile. If you recreate your wallet using keywords there, it will show your BTC and BCC side by side.
deleted 9y ago
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bdamm 9y ago

Raw cryptocurrency is definitely not for the layman. Really it's for the financial processors. Personally I view the benefit of Bitcoin and its ilk to be the efficiency, transferability and accountability that comes with the blockchain. Those willing to invest time and energy can also carry raw bitcoins in their safe if they so choose, but this is a far way away from being accessible to the layman. Think HTML. How many laypeople know HTML? Yet they get the benefit of the web thanks to all of the developers that have built services using it. Those services wouldn't be available without it.

CGamesPlay 9y ago
Can you give an example? I'm having a lot of trouble following your comparison to HTML. HTML is a material which composes documents, and I don't have to understand the material to understand the value of the resulting document. What will bitcoin build that will be useful to me without needing to own bitcoin directly?
- bdamm 9y ago
  Making intra-bank transactions more efficient is one; the floor of money transfers will be both cheaper and faster. Wire transfers are expensive and can be very slow (sometimes more than a day) for example. Bitcoin being a real transaction mechanism between institutions that is cheaper than wires and faster than wires (works on Sunday!) puts pressure on the banks to either compete or adapt. Another example is enablement of micro-payments (perhaps on side-chains) where conventional money transfers don't scale well - someone, not your (artists) preferred broker, is holding your money until it aggregates up to a transferrable sum. Now there's pressure to make that sum smaller and the transfer frequency greater. And, although not everyone needs this, for those of us that have been in the situation of doing international money transfers, they are a huge pain, unreasonably expensive, and slow too. Bitcoin puts pressure on all this, and I believe we're already seeing companies pop up that offer transfers in your preferred currency but are using Bitcoin behind the scenes to settle the transfers.

sf_rob 9y ago

You're right in your main point that it's a massive pain, but let's talk BTC/BCC. Disclosure: I'm a novice. BCC has "replay protection" meaning it uses a different transaction signing mechanism than BTC so that your transactions on one network cannot be "replay"ed on the other network by a malicious actor. I think people obsessing over keeping your coins in wallets with differing keys is mostly just paranoia. e.g. they want to eliminate threat vectors from their BCC wallet trying to steal BTC or that replay-protection may have bugs discovered in the future (unlikely AFAIK). The clean computer thing is also paranoia. Some folks keep an updated Linux LiveUSB just for their transactions. You can decide for yourself it it's worth the risk. As far as finding a new wallet, a quick Googling makes it seem that MultiBit uses BIP32 to generate keys. This is an open-source keyword based key generator that's used by various wallets, so you have a lot of options for multi-coin wallets, I'm a fan of coinomi on mobile. If you recreate your wallet using keywords there, it will show your BTC and BCC side by side.

deleted 9y ago

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