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All the scams and fraud don't help. I don't think UX presents the main problem. People eventually saw through the hype and figured out that crypto doesn't add a

All the scams and fraud don't help. I don't think UX presents the main problem. People eventually saw through the hype and figured out that crypto doesn't add any value except for criminals.

PaulHoule 3y ago
… and the market for payments is pretty crowded with everything from Visa and Mastercard to Venmo, Western Union and suitcases of cash. I have been thinking about the fedi lately and how it is missing single sign in which would enable all sorts of supporting services. I used to think “web3” was beneath contempt (scams) but the idea of “authentication first” is appealing to me now although fundamentally a decentralized auth system means being responsible for cryptographic keys which is just terrible from a UX perspective.
- confoundcofound 3y ago
  This is why I think the problem is ultimately UX. The ideals of crypto are sound, but an appropriate UX for mass adoption is just not achievable due to inherent traits of the underlying tech. As someone familiar with crypto, I would never consider managing my assets on the blockchain in the current product landscape. It seems the entire industry is filled with builders who are just dog-fooding janky products to each other under the guise of traction.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    I think think the problem is intrinsic. “Good UX” has to include “easy enrollment” and “some central authority can reset my password” and the failure of either means a user loses 100% of the function of the application. Look at how end-to-end encryption of email has not caught on although it was possible in the late 1990s, the horror of gpg, or how the NSA gave up on nerfing encryption algorithms because people will always screw up key management. (Che Guevara might have lived to lead another revolution if he hadn’t misused his ‘unbreakable’ one-time pads.)
  - gregjor 3y ago
    By "ideals of crypto" do you mean the techno-libertarian political ideals? Or the fundamental technical ideas? Crypto has failed to deliver on decentralized, anonymous, frictionless, secure, ubiquitous, cheap, efficient, free from government interference or taxation, etc. Maybe those all stem from poor UI, but I don't think so -- the whole thing at best is a solution looking for a problem, and at worst an outright fraud.
WorldMaker 3y ago
I don't think all the scams and fraud are an accident. It's hard to not cynically feel like cryptocurrency has always been scams all the way down. The bare distributed consensus algorithms are scams: Proof of Work is a wild lottery that would be illegal under certain lottery laws in US if the output was US Dollars instead of, say, Bitcoin. Proof of Stake doesn't fix the more problematic lottery aspects, it just adds a "Rich Gets Richer, People with More Money Get More Tickets" scam on top. Premining was a massive heist scam at the beginning of the ledger, available for all to see the evidence of it. Bitcoin's legitimacy hedges a lot on that promise that those early wallets are inaccessible. There's never any certainty on that promise, especially in the way Satoshi is a mythologized figure that maybe never existed or maybe is one of a handful of known scammers claiming to be him. It shouldn't be a shock how many ICOs were premining scams when that lies at the heart of Bitcoin. I feel like even the name "blockchain" is a form of fraud at the center of cryptocurrencies. The data structure is clearly a Merkle tree. "Forks" in the chains aren't an accident or an aberration, they are a natural shape of the data structure and all the handwaving and "yeah, but Proof of Work and coalitions of miners and majority ownership" sociopolitical contrivances don't fix the technical fact that these things are trees, always have been, and always will be. (How many Bitcoin forks are we up to being tracked in the major exchanges now? 6 was the last I counted, months back. And at least 3 Ethereum forks. Those numbers aren't "accidents", that's not an aberration from the norm, that is clearly the norm and the earliest forks were all long ago enough now that most people have only known them as trees and never actually "singular chains".) Again, I know I've got a very cynical view of all this, and I know not everyone agrees with my views on the above, but they say scammers can often recognize their own, and when so many scams have happened on top of cryptocurrencies, it is very hard not to wonder: When even the technology and terminology resemble scams and frauds, is it any real surprise how many scams and frauds keep getting run on top of them?

All the scams and fraud don't help. I don't think UX presents the main problem. People eventually saw through the hype and figured out that crypto doesn't add any value except for criminals.

PaulHoule 3y ago

… and the market for payments is pretty crowded with everything from Visa and Mastercard to Venmo, Western Union and suitcases of cash. I have been thinking about the fedi lately and how it is missing single sign in which would enable all sorts of supporting services. I used to think “web3” was beneath contempt (scams) but the idea of “authentication first” is appealing to me now although fundamentally a decentralized auth system means being responsible for cryptographic keys which is just terrible from a UX perspective.

confoundcofound 3y ago
This is why I think the problem is ultimately UX. The ideals of crypto are sound, but an appropriate UX for mass adoption is just not achievable due to inherent traits of the underlying tech. As someone familiar with crypto, I would never consider managing my assets on the blockchain in the current product landscape. It seems the entire industry is filled with builders who are just dog-fooding janky products to each other under the guise of traction.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  I think think the problem is intrinsic. “Good UX” has to include “easy enrollment” and “some central authority can reset my password” and the failure of either means a user loses 100% of the function of the application. Look at how end-to-end encryption of email has not caught on although it was possible in the late 1990s, the horror of gpg, or how the NSA gave up on nerfing encryption algorithms because people will always screw up key management. (Che Guevara might have lived to lead another revolution if he hadn’t misused his ‘unbreakable’ one-time pads.)
- gregjor 3y ago
  By "ideals of crypto" do you mean the techno-libertarian political ideals? Or the fundamental technical ideas? Crypto has failed to deliver on decentralized, anonymous, frictionless, secure, ubiquitous, cheap, efficient, free from government interference or taxation, etc. Maybe those all stem from poor UI, but I don't think so -- the whole thing at best is a solution looking for a problem, and at worst an outright fraud.

WorldMaker 3y ago

I don't think all the scams and fraud are an accident. It's hard to not cynically feel like cryptocurrency has always been scams all the way down. The bare distributed consensus algorithms are scams: Proof of Work is a wild lottery that would be illegal under certain lottery laws in US if the output was US Dollars instead of, say, Bitcoin. Proof of Stake doesn't fix the more problematic lottery aspects, it just adds a "Rich Gets Richer, People with More Money Get More Tickets" scam on top. Premining was a massive heist scam at the beginning of the ledger, available for all to see the evidence of it. Bitcoin's legitimacy hedges a lot on that promise that those early wallets are inaccessible. There's never any certainty on that promise, especially in the way Satoshi is a mythologized figure that maybe never existed or maybe is one of a handful of known scammers claiming to be him. It shouldn't be a shock how many ICOs were premining scams when that lies at the heart of Bitcoin. I feel like even the name "blockchain" is a form of fraud at the center of cryptocurrencies. The data structure is clearly a Merkle tree. "Forks" in the chains aren't an accident or an aberration, they are a natural shape of the data structure and all the handwaving and "yeah, but Proof of Work and coalitions of miners and majority ownership" sociopolitical contrivances don't fix the technical fact that these things are trees, always have been, and always will be. (How many Bitcoin forks are we up to being tracked in the major exchanges now? 6 was the last I counted, months back. And at least 3 Ethereum forks. Those numbers aren't "accidents", that's not an aberration from the norm, that is clearly the norm and the earliest forks were all long ago enough now that most people have only known them as trees and never actually "singular chains".) Again, I know I've got a very cynical view of all this, and I know not everyone agrees with my views on the above, but they say scammers can often recognize their own, and when so many scams have happened on top of cryptocurrencies, it is very hard not to wonder: When even the technology and terminology resemble scams and frauds, is it any real surprise how many scams and frauds keep getting run on top of them?