Grandmas On Lightning

Is Bitcoin Too Hard To Understand?

I’ve spent a huge part of the last three years explaining Bitcoin to general audiences and the most common form of resistance I encounter is: “Bitcoin is too complicated. The masses will never understand it.”

It’s a fair argument. Bitcoin is complicated and if you want to reach a competent understanding of the big picture then, at a minimum, you’d better get ready to learn about peer-to-peer networks, cryptography and the history of money.

It’s for this reason that I find it bizarre when I hear from friends in the space that Bitcoin is “inevitable.” There’s a belief that one day the masses will suddenly realize the merits of Bitcoin and adopt it on their own. This is certainly not what happened with me. To get to an understanding of Bitcoin I was comfortable with, I had to spend hours with articles, books, podcasts, videos and debating the concepts online. This content had to be produced by other people. Maybe if Andreas Antonopolous didn’t upload 500 videos or Nathaniel Popper didn’t write Digital Gold, then I might still have been in the crowd saying: “lol scam.”

There’s a counter-belief as well, and it’s that Bitcoin is simply too complicated for mere mortals to understand, and that mass adoption will only happen when Bitcoin and the Lightning Network are so simple that grandmas can use it. In The Gates of Bitcoin, John Carvalho calls this the “Grandma’s Razor Fallacy”: the elitist belief that new tech is too complicated and we need to protect people from it for their own good. He also points out:

We’ve seen this play out over and over in Bitcoin’s 11-year story. In 2011, Wikileaks learned how to use Bitcoin very quickly after Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union cut it off because of threats from the U.S. Senate. Despite Satoshi Nakamoto himself gatekeeping and telling Wikileaks NOT to use Bitcoin to circumvent the U.S. government, Wikileaks did it anyway and it’s estimated it received some 4,000 BTC in donations. Not only did this keep it alive despite a coordinated effort to kill it financially, it gave it a treasure chest that allows it to persist until today.

Another example, and my favorite, is from 2014. The Women’s Annex Foundation (WAF) in Afghanistan used bitcoin to pay their members for their work in writing, software development and video editing. This was under Taliban rule, where women were not allowed to own bank accounts, earn a living or even go to school.

Incentives are a powerful thing. When it’s a matter of life and death, people suddenly discover it’s not that hard to download a mobile app and copy-paste an address. Bitcoin suddenly becomes not all that complicated.

I want to break down the idea of Bitcoin’s complexity a little further. There are layers to it. Bitcoin is certainly hard to understand, but that doesn’t mean that it’s hard to use. Most people can drive a car or send an e-mail without understanding the internal combustion engine or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). And certainly both of these were considered “too complicated” for the masses.

The very idea of “difficulty” can be unpacked further. For now, I’ll break it down into two concepts: Technical Difficultyand Perceived Difficulty.

Technical Difficultyis the skill required to execute something. Like downloading an app, or driving a car or playing the violin. You have to learn to use the tool. Designers can (partially) lower the skill required by creating user-friendly tools. But they cannot eliminate it. Yet when we look at the number of people who can drive cars and use social media, we see that millions of people, including grandmas, are willing to learn complex operations if you can offer them the opportunity to drive to the mall or fight with anonymous people on Twitter.

Perceived Difficultyis the psychological hurdle, i.e., the belief that something is difficult. It’s when someone says: “I don’t understand calculus, it’s too hard.” Then you ask them how long they’ve studied it and they say: “Well I haven’t tried, because it’s too hard.” Perceived difficulty shows up all the time. People will claim that going on a diet or studying for a test are “too hard” when, from a Technical Difficulty perspective, these things are easy. Don’t eat the cake, go to your room and study. The problem really is incentives. People don’t want to study. They do want to eat the cake. Getting them to change behavior has nothing to do with Technical Difficultyand everything to do with addressing why they do or don’t want to do these things in the first place.

I’ve encountered Perceived Difficultymany times in Bitcoin. The most glaring times are the repeated examples where people would message me to say that they bought a large sum of bitcoin but kept it on an exchange. Every single time, I would explain that this is a bad idea, and every time I would hear back: “it’s too complicated.” This prompted me to write not one, but two articles. First, on why keeping bitcoin on an exchange is a bad idea, and second, on how to set up a wallet, both as short and simple as possible. I sent both articles to one of those people. Finally, he relented. He downloaded a wallet, backed up his seed phrase and took his bitcoin off the exchange. “Ok fine,” he told me in the end, “that wasn’t so hard.”

With Lightning, we might eventually be able to take the Technical Difficulty of using Bitcoin all the way down. On the Lightning Network you don’t need to think about blocks, confirmations or fees. As the network matures, you may not even have to worry about channels or capacity either. And with products like Strike, you may not even have to know that you’re using Lightning at all. The dream of Lightning is to eventually provide a dead-simple user experience that still gives people the freedom and autonomy Bitcoin is known for. But even if that experience became available tomorrow, the Perceived Difficulty would remain.

The good news is that Perceived Difficulty is ultimately a culture. When I was a kid, using a computer was considered so abstruse you needed a “computer course” to be considered competent enough to use one. Today, you are considered functionally illiterate if you cannot use a computer by age ten. But that culture doesn’t change on its own. We need to change it if we want Bitcoin to be all that it can be for those who need it. We need to alter the perception and align the incentives. And then, one day, we’ll have more grandmas in Bitcoin. If you want to see what that looks like, read up about Hodlonaut’s #LNTrustChain. John Carvalho was there (#115), I was there (#171), Bitcoin Magazine was there (#235) and a lot of people who said Bitcoin is too complicated weren’t there. But do you know who was there? A grandma:

At 88, my grandmother is able to text, FaceTime and stream YouTube videos to a TV. She encouraged me to attend a Lightning Hackathon and she’s ready to take the lightning torch next! She can even be the oldest person to do so!! @starkness@labitcoineta@hodlonaut#LNTrustChainpic.twitter.com/Gd9gNKbELe

— Crypto Rabbit 🦇🔊 (@cryptorabbitt) February 18, 2019

Satoshi Freeathlon Raises Awareness Through Sport

Triathlons are some of the most physically-demanding and spectacular athletic trials. Most of the time, this arduous display of strength and endurance has participants push their limits by swimming, cycling and running for 30 miles or more. But when spending bitcoin and promoting the principles of “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto” (including human rights, freedom of information, free speech, privacy and transaction freedom) are the fundamental goals, any sporting event becomes a lot more interesting. 

Between August 24 and August 28, 2019, seven athletes from three different nations will take on a 222 miles (357 kilometer) challenge which begins in the central city of Zug, Switzerland, and concludes in Munich, Germany. The name of the triathlon is the Satoshi Freeathlon, and its purpose is to raise public awareness around the importance of decentralization in power and money. 

Originally, Bavarian entrepreneur Vitus Zeller sought to create some positive Bitcoin-related media coverage with a 621 miles (1,000 kilometer) bicycle ride across the Swiss Alps. The initiative, which marked the 10th anniversary of Bitcoin, was called Tour de Satoshi and put him in the middle of a 10-day trip from Florence, Italy, to Frankfurt, Germany, and challenged him to pay for his hotel rooms with bitcoin. 

“I scouted more than 50 hotels to be able to stay at seven hotels,” Zeller told Bitcoin Magazine. “And doing such a crazy bike tour in winter was, in every hotel, received as a special thing. I am quite sure the staff in all of those hotels were talking about this … so I’m sure it raised attention there. Also, en route, people asked me what I was doing and why I was travelling by bike in such harsh conditions.”

After the success of this first attempt, Zeller decided to raise the bar by creating the Satoshi Freeathlon. 

“I decided to continue, because Tour de Satoshi was perceived well and I got a lot of great feedback,” Zeller said. “At bitcoin events, suddenly people came up to me and recognized me and were excited about what I did.”

This time, it’s not just about him facing a physical challenge accompanied by bitcoin alone, as six other athletes are involved. And they’ve added in a more complex trial where they must pass a Lightning torch from one to the other. During the event, spectators can make donations and basically increase the positivity of the subsequent media coverage: the more satoshis get raised, the more buzz there’s going to be around the event.

The torch concept is a mix of the Olympic flame and Hodlonaut’s #LNTrustChain initiative from earlier this year. Consequently, the participants can be followed throughout their journey via Twitter, and anyone interested can search for the #tstorch hashtag. From there, donations can be sent via Lightning Network or to the following BTC address: 173SRmGLwHW7QZDsFW9RLpggn3iBboL7Ns. In the true spirit of sportsmanship, the donations don’t get officially validated until the moment when the torch gets passed to another one of the seven athletes — call it a special timestamp, if you will. Furthermore, after each day the social media accounts will be updated with highlights of the trials.

Among the best known bitcoiners who are participating in the Freeathlon will be LocalBitcoins founder Jeremias Kangas, Bitcoin & Co. podcast host Anita Posch and Frankfurt School Blockchain Center’s Veronika Kütt. The Team Satoshi Torch (#tstorch) will be lit on August 24, 2019, by Zeller who begins his journey in Zug, and last recipient Kütt will arrive at the Southern German destination four days later. Finally, the #tstorch will be taken to the Bikini Mitte Bar, the only place in Munich where it’s possible to pay with bitcoin on the base layer or via Lightning. 

The event is meant to expand the Team Satoshi project by encouraging more athletes to get involved in promoting the philosophical values of Bitcoin. In this sense, a share of the satoshis raised will be used to support many more athletic trials involving an increasing number of enthusiasts.

“Mostly, [bitcoin] is only talked about as simply a speculative asset, drug money or an energy-consuming technology,” Zeller said. “I believe bitcoin needs more voices from within the ecosystem that show openly that they stand for this and sports is a great way of doing that. Sports have historically been a powerful tool to grab peoples’ attention and emotions.”

BitPiggys Helps Children Stack Satoshis and Learn Financial Responsibility

Piggy banks have long served as a symbol of financial prudence and savings, a place to deposit pocket change and hold it for a rainy day. But what if fiat coins aren’t the best stores of value after all? For Jim, the creator of Opendime-powered company BitPiggys, these novelty banks clearly needed an introduction to Bitcoin.

Bitcoin has always been appreciated by its adopters for its uncensorable and non-confiscatable nature. While many government-backed currencies can undergo unpredictable inflation or other manipulations, Satoshi’s invention is steady and robust. So, when it comes to storing a valuable, in-demand asset for times of greater adoption, bitcoin and piggy banks might be the perfect match.

When Jim (also known as FF2K or @fartface2000 on Twitter) created BitPiggys, he definitely had the extended, sound-money qualities of Bitcoin in mind. The New Jersey entrepreneur, who also holds the distinction of being the first recipient of Hodlonaut’s #LNTrustChain, took on the principle of skeuomorphism by bringing something natively digital into the tangible world. The resulting product is a combination of good old piggy banks and the technology provided by an Opendime USB stick, which generates public keys without revealing the private key. 

“It was around the time that Coinstar announced that they would be selling bitcoin at their change machines, I just thought how great would it be to be able to collect change and convert it to bitcoin,” Jim told Bitcoin Magazine. “And then I started to think about a piggy bank. I think I tweeted something in reference to it in January of 2019, just kind of putting the idea out there.”

The initiative has caught the attention of some significant community members who saw value in the idea of creating piggy banks for children who want to start saving: “Mr. Hodl encouraged me, along with NVK, Mike In Space and Adam Meister — all of which I was listening and learning from,” Jim said.

BitPiggys and Opendime

Interestingly, the Opendime USB device itself is advertised as a piggy bank, as its features very much resemble those of the ceramic or plastic swine that holds your coins. You can keep on adding money to them without being able to spend it — it’s only the process of opening up the piggy that gives you complete control over the funds (in the case of the hardware device, “opening up” can be thought of as revealing the private key).

Jim’s innovation hinged on turning this description into a physical representation that’s easy to understand for young “first coiners.” Just as the first versions of the iPhone’s operating system featured app icons and interfaces which looked just like their tangible counterparts (the notepad had lines and the media library was positioned on a shelf), BitPiggys integrates a novel concept onto something known and time tested. 

When talking about his approach to skeuomorphism, Jim mentioned that “the BitPiggy is actually just a figurine, the actual brains of the package is the Opendime. It allows me to produce a unique public key without exposing the private key, so I can print up corresponding QR codes and the Bitpiggy/Opendime owner can physically verify that the Opendime is sealed and safe to deposit funds.”

Children will be able to stack satoshis without having to operate other user interfaces, and they can be taught how to check their balance by using a block explorer or full node when they grow up. Furthermore, the fact that sats on an Opendime are harder to spend than quarters means that time preference education is included as part of the process.

“My target audience is actually existing bitcoiners who want to introduce their pre-coiner friends to accumulating sound money,” said Jim. “The responsibility of having kids and saving for their future will make you learn anything. It’s an easy first step to get them interested.”

At press time, the first prototype of the BitPiggy (named “Version 1.0”) is sold for $40 on the company’s website. In comparison, a three-pack of Opendimes costs $44.97, which means that the profit for the design and labor of the piggy is minimal. However, extra revenue is brought by opting in for features such as the inclusion of an additional Opendime and 3 QR labels, as well as the gift wrapping. If you already own the hardware device and just want to order the colorful swine, then you may also pursue this DIY approach.

Jim noted that feedback, so far, has been minimal, “but mostly positive. The product is supposed to be fun and educational. I hope that it encourages the owners to learn more about Bitcoin.”

Future Improvements

The BigPiggys creator has some clear ideas about the ways in which the Opendime-powered piggy banks can be improved. He wants the product to generate a different address each time with the help of something like BTCPay Server and eventually include full node integration. 

“I would hope that in the future, a company that produces a turn-key node like Casa or Nodl will offer a piggy bank as a device that communicates with your node,” he said. “It would be great if it could generate new addresses on every deposit and verify all transactions via your node. Even better if there was a kid-friendly ‘watch-only’ wallet app that enabled setting goals and checking savings.”

Jim has plans in the works to distribute his piggies all across Europe. Furthermore, the American bitcoiner sees potential in BitPiggys beyond personal profits and regards it as an educational tool for the next generation: “The goal of BitPiggys is to get some satoshis in the next generation’s hands, so they can be in a position to hopefully make better financial decisions for themselves in the future. This will help all of society.”