Indeed, fully agreed. The only way to really make progress here is to make the UX of being your own bank not only as good as trusting a third party, but better.

I've been encouraged by the rise of risk analysis services, but we need to integrate them into wallets more widely for them to have much impact. Otherwise people get to pick between a variety of wallets, none of which have all the features they want. And TREZOR is cool, albeit, something that's going to be for committed users only.



On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 4:15 PM, Eric Martindale <eric@ericmartindale.com> wrote:

We need to make it so mind-numbingly simple to "run Bitcoin correctly" that the average user doesn't find reasons to do so in the course of normal use.  Right now, Coinbase and Bitstamp are winning in the user experience battle, which technically endanger the user, and by proxy the Bitcoin network.

Multi-sig as a default is a start.  It won't succeed unless the user experience is simply better than trusted third parties, but we need to start the education process with the very basic fundamental: trusting a third-party with full access to your Bitcoin is just replacing one centralized banking system with another.

Eric Martindale
Developer Evangelist, BitPay
+1 (919) 374-2020

On Apr 7, 2014 7:05 AM, "Mike Hearn" <mike@plan99.net> wrote:
My guess is that a large number of users have lost interest after they
lost their money in MtGox. The 24th of February coincides with the
"final" shutdown

Sigh. It would not be surprising if MtGox has indeed dealt the community a critical blow in this regard. TX traffic is down since then too:


Judging from comments and the leaked user db, it seems a lot of well known people lost money there   (not me fortunately). I wish I could say people have learned but from the size of the deposit base at Bitstamp they clearly have not. A lot of Bitcoin users don't seem to be ready to be their own bank, yet still want to own some on the assumption everyone else either is or soon will be. So it's really only a matter of time until something goes wrong with some large bitbank again, either Bitstamp or Coinbase.

Some days I wonder if Bitcoin will be killed off by people who just refuse to use it properly before it ever gets a chance to shine. The general public doesn't distinguish between "Bitcoin users" who deposit with a third party and the real Bitcoin users who don't.

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