Bitcoin and Freedom by Design

“It’s really difficult to engineer freedom tech—solutions that require you to kind of take ownership of your money, take ownership of your data. These things typically have engineering solutions that are harder to build; they might take a longer time to build, or it might actually require the user to kind of learn something new.”

Two days after Square unleashed Bitcoin payments on four million merchants, we’re asking the uncomfortable question: what if buttery-smooth UX beats self-custody every time?

I don't think it has to involve friction. There's this kind of idea that as something becomes more accessible, when you find something early on, you like it more because you had to work hard to find it. I don't like that kind of hipster mentality.
— Stephen DeLorme

Timestamps

00:31 Square's Bitcoin launch and the custody versus UX tradeoff
02:40 Stephen's background: from graphic design to Bitcoin product design
05:36 Does self-sovereignty require friction, or is that hipster gatekeeping?
08:03 Learning software deeply versus making everything easy to use
11:47 Why most people don't need freedom tech until it's too late
16:22 Freedom tech's inherent engineering disadvantages
21:15 The manual problem: when learning curves actually helped users
27:08 Merchant adoption versus user sovereignty in Bitcoin payments
35:42 Why governments resisted Bitcoin but not the Lightning Network
41:28 Intention theft: when free products extract value you don't see
48:19 Privacy as a cyclical adoption driver tied to partisan politics
54:37 Building Trojan horses: freedom tech that wins by being useful first
1:00:10 What if most people prefer beautiful surveillance over ugly freedom?

Resources

About Stephen DeLorme

Stephen DeLorme is UX/UI Leader at Voltage, where he works on Bitcoin infrastructure and Lightning Network products. He co-founded ATL BitLab, Atlanta's Bitcoin hackerspace that hosts weekly meetups and developer events. Previously, he received a Spiral grant to contribute Lightning Network UX best practices to the Bitcoin Design Guide. Before focusing on Bitcoin, DeLorme worked as a graphic designer and web developer, bringing a rare combination of design thinking and technical implementation to freedom tech products.

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