[vacri]

An addendum from the UX side: bitcoin is not usable by anyone who hasn't spent a lot of time learning about it. It basically requires users to understand what the blockchain is and the limitations of it, whereas other currencies don't require regular users to understand the backend machinery. It can't ever be more than a niche tool, because the general public isn't interested in learning backend machinery for currency.

[kneel]

It can be as simple as scanning qr codes with your phone wallet.

Aaron Voisine has done an incredible job with breadwallet, highly recommended.

[acdha]

How do you protect your wallet from theft? Back it up so losing your phone isn't catastrophic? Maintain separate wallets so one accident or compromise doesn't cost you everything? Confirm that a transaction was committed before exchanging anything of value?

Almost everyone knows how to handle real-life concerns like that with traditional currency. If you want something new to get any sort of adoption, people are going to need satisfying answers before they'll feel comfortable putting real value into it.

[kneel]

Literally the first thing that happens when you create a wallet in breadwallet is you are given a seed phrase with instructions. Many wallets use this technique (BIP38)

If you ever lose your phone you can recover your wallet with this phrase.

[acdha]

That's a partial answer to only one question which, if a quick google search is correct, ignores all but the easiest problem: BIP38 appears to offer a way to backup a primary key using a printout and a memorized passphrase. That doesn't answer what happens if they lose one of those two things, much less what happens if someone malicious gets either the primary or the backup.

Remember that I didn't say your favorite toy sucks, only that not everyone else has your level of appreciation for it. Most people aren't going to put serious amounts of money into something which they don't trust and the status quo works fairly well for the average person: increasingly few people carry significant amounts of cash, most people use bank accounts and credit cards, etc. which means that the maximum cost is usually either capped or otherwise (e.g. you lose your ATM card but the recovery cost is only the time it takes to go to the bank with photo ID).

Bitcoin can do interesting things but getting non-aficionados to use it will depend on getting to a comparable degree of confidence, especially since most people don't share the [over-]confidence that the typical Bitcoin advocate has regarding their personal info-sec footing.

[kneel]

>That's a partial answer to only one question which, if a quick google search is correct, ignores all but the easiest problem: BIP38 appears to offer a way to backup a primary key using a printout and a memorized passphrase. That doesn't answer what happens if they lose one of those two things, much less what happens if someone malicious gets either the primary or the backup.

Bitcoin's slogan is 'be your own bank' which means you're ultimately responsible for your own security. If you're hacked, you're hacked. This is no different from modern day identity theft.

>Remember that I didn't say your favorite toy sucks, only that not everyone else has your level of appreciation for it. Most people aren't going to put serious amounts of money into something which they don't trust and the status quo works fairly well for the average person: increasingly few people carry significant amounts of cash, most people use bank accounts and credit cards, etc. which means that the maximum cost is usually either capped or otherwise (e.g. you lose your ATM card but the recovery cost is only the time it takes to go to the bank with photo ID).

Bitcoin isn't ready for the average user, much like computers in the 80s weren't ready for the average user. That isn't stopping developers who can see the writing on the wall.

I think there is a very good argument to be made that traditional currencies are not as safe as they once were as the federal reserve continues it's historically unprecedented experiments.

[acdha]

“be your own bank” is at least honest but it's very different from what most proponents say.

> This is no different from modern day identity theft.

Identity theft is a nuisance caused by large companies trying to dodge responsibility for negligence onto the public. The failure mode is that your credit rating is damaged, not that all of your money ends up irrecoverably belonging to some guy in Russia – and you have legal means to solve these problems.

> Bitcoin isn't ready for the average user, much like computers in the 80s weren't ready for the average user.

Fewer people could afford them but 80s PCs were incredibly useful – things like VisiCalc and WordStar transformed offices, the gaming industry had grown enough to support multiple dedicated studios, etc. People were willing to pay large amounts of money to own a PC precisely because it had real tangible value. Other than paying off ransomware, what can an adopter do with BitCoin which is significantly harder / impossible now? (Or, for many of the distributed ledger proposals, couldn't do faster using existing PKI?)

[vacri]

> Bitcoin's slogan is 'be your own bank' which means you're ultimately responsible for your own security.

And this gets back to my original point. Security is hard enough that it's common for seasoned security professionals to not follow best practices. Regular members of the public don't have a chance if they have to assume all the responsibility of their own security - this is why they outsource that to banks right now. Hence: in order to manage your own security properly with bitcoin, you have to understand the underpinnings of it. How can a person be ultimately responsible for their own security if they aren't aware of even the most basic of security issues in tech?

[wheelerwj]

You've never met a bitcoin user or tried to use it yourself. Most people whose bitcoin are not incredibly tech savy and set it up in minutes on their smart phones.

[vectorpush]

And thousands of them lose their money due to bugs or simple mistakes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/search?q=lost+wallet+help&r...

[wheelerwj]

thousands of people lose cash and misplace car keys too.

[cbhl]

Or, maybe they have. Maybe they lost some non-trivial amount of money from one of the half dozen former exchanges that had coins stolen out of their hot wallets. Or had someone hijack their AWS account credentials from GitHub to spin up hundreds of dollars of EC2 instance-hours to generate pennies of bitcoin.

[wheelerwj]

Yes, those are definitely use cases for the average user.

[cbhl]

They're not use cases, they're failure modes.

One of the great things about banks is that the transactions are reversible. People click the wrong button all the time, and they call up their bank and say "oops, please fix it".