Hacker News Reader

Comment by spectramax | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin has the same sort of issues that plague Linux Desktop and why Linux never took off as the defacto standard for PC OS.

It’s the lack of user focus. Setting up a bitcoin account, understanding the security implications, hardware wallet, secret keys, the whole enchilada is too big for an average consumer to digest.

Somewhere in Jobs’ biography by Walter Isaacson, there is a snippet about how products often fail when they’re designed by geeks, engineers and technology people - they make products to sell to customers that are like themselves. I’m an engineer myself and I also think the contrary is also true - products and services developed by “MBA” kinds often fail because the people in charge of the company roadmap have no fucking clue about the technical details and trade-offs of the product.

Bitcoin transaction process is designed for the most part for the nerds, not for the average Joe. I know there exists Coinbase and other “easy” setups for Bitcoin. But I’m talking about what happens when an average joe Googles “How to setup a bitcoin account”. Instant “nope” - I don’t have time for this shit and my personal money is at stake if I mess this up.

View on HN

I have a better analogy: Bitcoin has the same sort of issues as TCP/IP. It's weird that people are expected to interact with it on the protocol level.

I think the term "cryptocurrency" is the "Big Data" of 2018. The term itself has been somewhat tarnished, but the underlying technology is super useful and will find its way into a lot of applications.

And no, I don't mean "blockchain". I mean Bitcoin... it's rather nice as a business or individual to be able to send large amounts of money around the world without snaking through the nightmare that is international banking. Inherent in that idea is the notion that the coin itself has value independent of a particular application.

Most of the issues with "international banking" are infact just issues with North American banks.

I can transfer large sums of money around Europe and it will arrive in few days at the very latest. Within the same country transfers mostly arrive the same day (often it's under 1 hour), and sometimes that happens internationally too. Oh and I don't need to pay anything for that.

A few years ago I was working in the Middle East, and before I moved back I transferred my savings from there (~€50k) back to Europe without any questions from either bank. I just did the transfer online, and it arrived in a few days.

Now I'm working for a US company, and it took them a few weeks to setup paying me with their bank. It usually takes at least a week from when they tell the bank to pay me, until I receive the money in my account - to a USD account also in the US.

> Most of the issues with "international banking" are infact just issues with North American banks.

This. Whenever someone says that Cryptocurrencies solve money transfer problems, I look where they are based and 99% of the cases it is the US. In Europe, transferring money is the same internationally as it is nationally. Type in the IBAN and the name of the recipient and they get it the same day, or latest the next day. I made seven figure international payments that went through in 24 hours.

This is not a technical problem that Cryptocurrencies are somehow uniquely placed to solve. Technically, a money transfer could take miliseconds - updating a couple of database rows. National payments in Europe at least are actually pretty much instant since they are now fully automated. International payments can take up to a day due to an actual human checking the correctness (and perhaps doing due diligence for money laundering).

So? There's a huge amount of currency flowing to and from North America to Europe, Asia, etc. Just because the euro zone has standardized their banking system doesn't mean a) that America will ever do the same (cough the metric system cough), or b) that all movement of money across borders should be strictly the purview of banks.

In Canada alone people send $23.3B/year back to their country of origin in the form of remittances (China, India, the Philippines, etc.). Historically they've been massively overcharged for the privilege of doing so because they're held captive to our oligopolistic banking system - sometimes upwards of 20% because they regularly send smaller amounts to minimize risk.

How does your point relate to the usefulness of Bitcoin? I highlighted that the quagmire of international payments is not a problem that Bitcoin can uniquely solve. It is not a technical problem at all!

Bitcoin has nothing special about it that would allow these countries to make payments between each other smoother. That is apart from sidestepping the existing regulatory framework.

It might have the beneficial side effect of competition, but that's not a virtue of Bitcoin as a concept. Perhaps the space is ripe for a new fintech startup that streamlines payments between these destinations.

It's a distributed protocol with wide adoption and enough liquidity to be easily traded anywhere in the world.

That makes it great as a medium of common exchange... I can easily convert from Canadian Dollars to BTC in Canada, then convert from BTC to Pesos in the Philippines so long as there's enough liquidity on either end.

Both parties still have to act within their respective legal frameworks, but it sidesteps the need to add even more parties into the mix, each of which take their own fees. International wire transfers are a great example of how opaque, slow and costly that can be.

You can go customer -> Canadian Company -> Filipino company -> customer.

The traditional way would be customer -> Canadian Company -> Canadian bank -> Intermediary bank(s) -> Filipino bank -> Filipino company -> Customer

I'm simplifying somewhat... obviously banks are involved in any domestic fiat transfers, but they're not involved in international transmittal (which they usually charge quite a bit for).

I understood bitcoin transfers could take days. If so, that's not really very liquid?

It depends really. Transactions are usually processed based on the fee associated with them. If the network is exceptionally busy and you send a transaction with a low fee, yeah it'll take a while, but when creating the transaction you can adjust the fee (and most wallets will give you a few options) to make your transaction more valuable to miners, so it will be picked up more quickly.

Bitcoin from wallet A to wallet B usually only takes about 20 minutes but fiat -> bitcoin and bitcoin -> fiat can take a while, typically a day or so each and more if backlogged.

There appears to be plenty of competition in the "send money abroad" market

https://www.money.co.uk/money-transfers.htm

Nobody mentioned the Euro Zone before you did; they're talking about Europe "as a continent", for the most part.

Living in the UK, national payments are instant, with very few exceptions. And having lived in both Switzerland (where they use CHF), and Germany (Euros), I can say it's much the same across Europe.

International payments within Europe are fast too; a couple of days if you're changing currencies, and faster if both sides are in the Euro Zone.

Banks don't have to be slow. The only real issue I have is that the bank's exchange rates are criminal!

> The only real issue I have is that the bank's exchange rates are criminal!

Exchange fees show up in a number of different places. I have a Capital One card that I got specifically for the advertised "no foreign exchange fees". In reality, it consistently charges me about 1% more than the official exchange rate at any given point. 1% doesn't seem like a terrible fee. I wish it would itemize it, though.

Many merchants will not bill the card in their local currency -- instead, because it's a US card, they refuse to bill it in anything other than USD. That means they end up making me pay extra to cover their exchange costs, which are always exorbitant, maybe 10 times as much. They appear to have something worked out with their local bank, where the bank accepts payment in USD and gives them payment in CNY or HKD. Here, the bank is teaming up with the merchant to screw the customer without even benefiting the merchant.

I recently ordered something from Amazon's Canada site, and they generously offered to let me have them bill me in USD -- they would cover currency exchange themselves. Left unstated was that they would charge, again, an order of magnitude more for the service than my card would. At least they gave me the option to say "no, bill me in CAD".

The best option I generally have for transacting in China is to pull cash from an ATM (paying Capital One's 1%ish fee), and pay cash even for very large purchases. It's quite possible that banks aren't where you're getting hit by exorbitant fees -- transact directly with a bank, and you should be able to get low fees.

> Living in the UK, national payments are instant, with very few exceptions.

Well, anything within the same bank is instant. There is a commonly used mechanism in business accounts called "Faster Payments" which tend to settle even across banks in the UK within 2h.

Very recently - as in, in the last 4-6 weeks - a system called "SMS" was rolled out. Despite the name, it has nothing to do with text messaging. It's a new cross-bank settlement mechanism which promises to settle the transfer in 20 minutes within UK.

The reality is that SMS transfers don't work reliably across all the banks. Our payments and customer service teams had a bad week after we enabled SMS payments. When a supposedly faster transfer takes 5-6 days and you have to chase the bank(s) about payment states, there's clearly a fault somewhere.

>bank's exchange rates are criminal!

Transferwise is easy and are about 0.3% off interbank.

Interactive Brokers are a pain to set up but some tiny amount off like 0.02%

I love TransferWise. I live in Canada, and had 2k USD sitting in a Canadian bank account. I was going to convert it to CAD, but the bank's exchange rate is atrocious. So I opened a free US-based account with my bank's US division, transferred all my USDs there 1:1, then sent it through TransferWise to my Canadian account. A bit convoluted, but I saved close to $100 and it didn't take long to set up.

I see this point about remittance fees being made frequently. For payments from Canada to the Philippines, Xoom (bought out by Paypal) charges $2.99 to send $200 (1.5%) and $21.49 to send $1000 (2.2%). That's not anywhere near 20%.

I've worked in this industry in the past. Historically yes, poor people have been overcharged. The way they dealt with it was to develop networks of people who they could pay to carry the money with them on trips back home and set up a pickup. It's crude, but it's a system that persists in India and Pakistan, especially for unskilled migrants in the Middle East who don't have access to local banking services. Not really a target market for bitcoin given the steep learning curve.

For computer-literate migrants who work in developed countries and are OK with using banks, paypal etc, the fees are pretty reasonable.

Their exchange rates are terrible deals and blatantly taking advantage of people who only see the upfront fee and don't think further than that.

Get the feeling they'd have no problem making money with zero fees but that would suddenly make customers think twice about it.

This. Their posted fees mask exchange rates that are horrendous.

Can you open account with US dollars as a currency and transfer money there without any conversions, then withdraw and exchange locally?

Yes, you can, and that’s what most people do.

Cryptocurrencies have failed to make any inroads in this because A) People trust the existing services, and B) They're nowhere near as expensive as you say.

At this point it's just yet another talking point for enthusiasts, enthusiasts who have no idea about real-world use-cases.

An ACH transaction between two North American banks usually arrives on the next business day (if you place it before the cut-off time). In fact, ACH supports multiple settlements per day now so if that feature is supported by your bank ACH transfers can even arrive on the same business day. There are a few banks that are slower, but that's not the fault of ACH - don't use slow banks and you're not running into that issue.

That's very similar to SEPA transactions, with the exception that some European banks support real-time settlements for SEPA. For banks that don't support this yet funds usually arrive on the next business day.

Transfers between the US banking system and the European system are usually slow and expensive as those two systems aren't directly linked to each other. So you your bank needs to send the funds to a correspondent bank which forwards the funds to the final destination. But if you use 3rd party services such as TransferWise those transfers are significantly faster and cheaper. My last transfer from my US bank account to my European account (via TransferWise) arrived on the next business day and cost something like 0.36% on top of the mid-market rate.

But you cannot deposit money into any arbitrary U.S. bank account using ACH. For every account that you want to make transfers to, you first need to sign a bunch of forms. With the European IBAN system, no permissions or forms are needed to make deposits to a new arbitrary account.

Almost all of the US banks allow you to add other ACH accounts that you control. Just confirm the two trial deposits and you can push or pull money from that account.

A few banks also allow to send ACH transfers to third-party accounts that you don't control - for example with USAA that's possible. This still doesn't 100% match how transfers work in Europe (you first need to add the account, then wait 1-2 days, then you can send funds to it), but it's definitely better than "signing a bunch of forms".

> An ACH transaction between two North American banks usually arrives on the next business day (if you place it before the cut-off time).

I keep hearing this, but out of the many banks I've tried I've never once seen this happen. I just looked at a recent transaction; email shows I initiated it at 9:18am PST on Jan 30 (which could be past the cutoff if it was noon EST), the withdrawal account shows the money deducted on Jan 31, and the deposit account shows it landing on Jan 1--one business day, right? Nah, or at least I'm not informed of them on those days. I don't see them show up for another day or two. When the money does show up in the account, it's often "not available" for another day or two. I'm just one dude who happens to have a few different banks for savings and my wife's account and tries to pay bills on time. This was also a thing when I was pooling money for a mortgage downpayment. I can't imagine running a business.

It frustrates me that for a country that deifies financial markets and capitalism will ignore liquidity like this (even between accounts owned by the same entity). 1 business day (before the cutoff!) still isn't that great. The docs I found about same-day ACH said it was approved in 2015 and only rolled out last year...and it looks like they charge a fee per transaction[1][2]

[1] https://web.nacha.org/system/files/resource/2017-08/Same-Day...

[2] https://content.capitalone.com/TMgmt/images/Same_Day_ACH_%20...

> I can transfer large sums of money around Europe and it will arrive in few days at the very latest.

I can do the same in the US, except it’s instantaneous, not sure what you are talking about.

One surprise for me, as a European, is that in America people seem to regard bank account numbers as secret - I dwell on forums for landlords, etc, and people expect to collect cash/cheques from their tenants, rather than sharing bank details.

Unrelated to your alleged speed, but another odd perception of the American banking systems.

(Lots of other people in this thread seem to suggest you're an outlier; I don't know enough to guess either way.)

Your account number is on every checks. Checks are usually prefered because in the US you can cash them immediately and online.

Of course, YMMV. I've experienced both the US bank system and the EU (France) bank system. Even if Americans are very critical of our banks, no fee (usually) for anything, reduced red tape, and credit cards that are on your side won me over. When you take account of cash back and interests on checking, you've usually a cash positive relationship with you bank. Good luck finding that in Europe.

It's weird that slow banking is something that makes credit cards more useful.

And credit card transfers earn more money ( just putting 1 and 2 together)

* infact just issues with North American banks.*

Yup, same experience here. It takes at least 10 days to send a paltry 1000 USD for me and yes, there is a fee. The bank is probably making money on the exchange rate too, not sure. At one point, I was asked all kinds of documentation - passport etc. All this to send very small amounts of money (I don't remember sending more than 3K, 50K Euros without questions is amazing to me).

Edit: Many comments here mention that Europe is way ahead of the US i the money transfer space. Can someone talk about why the US is lagging behind?

There's a pretty good Planet Money episode on this issue:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/01/10/576879734/epis...

>Most of the issues with "international banking" are infact just issues with North American banks.

This is true only for transfers between and within Europe, north America and couple of exceptions in Asia. The world is bigger...

If I would receive $50k in Kazakhstan from foreign country, they will be put on hold for a few months for security investigations and I'll have to provide all the documents about that money before I could have them. And even then someone corrupted might invent something to steal them from me. I definitely don't trust banks for anything but pocket money.

I have a better analogy. Bitoin has the same issues as Flooz. It’s a more complicated and convoluted solution to a nonexistent problem.

The only people who have problems with spending money the normal way that are serious enough to accept the horrible user experience and unreliability of bitcoin are those conducting illegal transactions or evading currency controls. The market has no reason to rise beyond that narrow use case despite mass speculation to the contrary.

That's just ill-informed. "If you don't accept the banking oligopoly you're clearly trying to launder money" is the kind of nonsense that tries to shut down legitimate concerns over self-determination.

Money is an essential input to freedom. If you can't make an income, pay rent, buy food, pay for transportation, etc. you are not very free. I'd also go so far as to say that the right to transact anonymously should be part and parcel to a free society.

You're arguing an is with an ought. People ought to be able to to transact anonymously and without any middle-men. In reality, most people are only willing to put up with the inconveniences of bitcoin because it lets them side-step the law.

Wow, no...

I'm just a computer consultant trying to get paid. Bank payments to/from the US is an absolute, unmitigated train-wreck.

Even with the spectacular deficiencies of the Bitcoin/Ethereum user experience, it is already a vast improvement over the Bank transfer debacle.

The next generation of Cryptocurrencies (that solve most of the complexity/risk of creating, securing, managing and recovering public/private keys) and improve the transaction thruput and cost by 4+ orders of magnitude? These are going to kick the banks to curb.

A closer analogy might be credit card transactions, it's a protocol that tons of people use on a daily basis but the complexity has been wrapped up into a product offered by a several companies

I would say Bitcoin has the same issues as TCP/IP in 1984. It's just 10 years old. Developers know what to do (Eltoo, Schnorr signatures, better multisig for hardware wallets, watchtowers, better routing, AMP, Lightning support for exchanges), but implemention speed is limited, and just simply adding more developers or even complaining about lack of UX won't make it faster. Also people with Bitcoin don't accept the ,,move fast and break things'' mantra, because it's money. I like the cautious speed of development, it helps build my trust in Bitcoin.

> underlying technology is super useful and will find its way into a lot of applications.

I can't think of any other use cases other than illegal black markets.

> send large amounts of money around the world without snaking through the nightmare that is international banking

This has little to do with technology but with regulation. If you think bitcoin can solve this then you either envision a future where these regulations don't apply (in some sort of technologically independent anarchistic society) or you expect bitcoin to cause a reduction in the high regulation surrounding international asset transfers - which is very unlikely, regulators around the world are pushing for more stringent AML policies.

This is where a blockchain (the technology) could actually come in handy. If every asset is tokenized and controllable through some smart contract (and every transfer needs to be authorized by the responsible financial regulator) then such a system would make any kind of international asset transfer much more frictionless. But of course this runs contrary to the idea of most current crypto currencies (whose proponents mostly hope for the aforementioned scenario).

I don't understand the TCP analogy. TCP is incredibly straightforward and scales from a knowledge-required level of almost nothing to very advanced usage like paying attention to ECN markings. Most of the layers above TCP have, over the last 20+ years, had many many problems that related directly to people not wanting to understand TCP, from RMI and similar RPC schemes to things like BEEP/BXXP where the head-of-line blocking problem somehow surprised people.

In the end people working with technologies do need to understand their semantics. I don't mean you should be able to write a competent TCP implementation from scratch, but you do need to understand how the protocol layer makes itself an issue in every layer above it in practice.

It's worse than that; there is no compelling reason to use it for the vast majority of people. It's a strictly worse experience in nearly all respects compared to centralized options except in the case of dark net commerce where it's the only option.

It could be easier for tourism, online transactions, and person to person transactions. However, it's not, largely because of a chicken and egg problem similar to that which plagues Linux.

People don't use Bitcoin because it's complicated and unstable. It's complicated and unstable because the types of people that use it want to speculate with it or use it for illegal purposes. Just making it more approachable won't fix the stability issues, so it likely won't increase the number of users in a meaningful enough way to get it to take off.

The same is true for desktop Linux. And installing Linux is often easier than installing another OS (Windows or macOS). Take Ubuntu or Mint, for example. They're the most popular among users new to Linux, and installation is as easy or easier than Windows since drivers come preinstalled and the user is prompted if proprietary drivers are available. The problems arise when trying to use software not deigned for Linux (e.g. MS Office), and this is getting better all the time with investment into the Windows compatibility layer by Valve.

However, the chicken and egg problem will always be there. A decentralized system like Bitcoin can't really be saved by investment from a third party since it can't solve the volatility problem without centralization.

For this reason, I think looking at centralized, but not government run, systems is interesting. For example, GNU Taler is a centralized cryptocurrency that can be used for anything (one example was currency used at conferences) with incredibly low transaction costs. I think it's interesting because it gets people used to using something digital (and not government provided/managed) to make transactions, but without having to deal with volatility inherent in cryptocurrencies, and once cryptocurrencies stabilize, perhaps they can be a drop-in replacement.

I really want decentralized currencies to work out (largely to make traveling less of a pain), but nothing I've seen is worth making more user-friendly.

How can it get any easier than one of the 87 different mobile apps that let you send money to another person with a few taps?

The fact alone that are 87 different mobile apps makes it difficult. Which one do you use? Is there a difference?

Having one single, well-branded app is easier to use than 87 random no-name apps.

> Having one single, well-branded app is easier to use than 87 random no-name apps.

But there's no need for this to be a cryptocurrency app, that's the point.

These amazing things that cryptocurrency enthusiasts tell us could be made possible using their magic beans - millions of people are already doing them just fine.

While this is true, Bitcoin does nothing to solve that problem. It just adds even more choices to the pile.

It's easier because it doesn't require any sign-up. You simply download some compatible software and you're ready to run. Every other of the 87 services requires sign-up, which means filling out forms and uploading photos of ID. If you're lucky to be in a well-developed country with proper ID, you might be able to get an account!

It takes about a minute to sign up with these apps. No ID needed.

You need to sign up for a bank account if you want to use bitcoin in practice. Meeting up with random people in the streets to trade money for digital currency is definitely not easier than signing up for Venmo.

Venmo has the prerequisite that you have a bank account. That excludes a massive portion of the human population from the get go, and puts various obstacles in people's way depending on their background.

Acquiring bitcoin will become incredibly simple with services like azte.co, which work in pretty much the same way that most people used to top up their pay-to-go phone less than 20 years ago. People forget how rapidly things move.

If you think at the level of "this is how it works now", you will never comprehend the potential of Bitcoin. The exchanges which operate in the bitcoin space now will be about as relevant as phone booths were as a means of making phone calls remotely. People will forget they ever existed.

The way most people will acquire Bitcoin in future is the way they currently acquire fiat money - in exchange for their time and labor. There won't be any other "exchange" process.

There is no chicken-egg problem. There is no chicken. There is no reason for anyone to use bitcoin except for a tiny niche.

The comparison to Linux Desktop is correct but for the wrong reasons. Like with bitcoin, nobody has any reason to switch to a Linux Desktop since the existing solutions already do everything people want. If you're non-technical and are already comfortable with Windows or Mac, you gain nothing by switching to a linux desktop.

>centralized options

This seems to be the crux of all of these discussions and why they inevitably go nowhere.

For a small but passionate core of libertarian-minded crypto/Bitcoin boosters, decentralization is a good unto itself. All other issues caused by it are irrelevant.

Hard for normal people to use? But it's decentralized! Not useful for anything normal people want to do? But it's decentralized! Massive price fluctuations render it largely unusable? But it's decentralized! Rife with scams and fraud? But it's decentralized!

This makes it impossible to discuss because this small group's focus is so different from everyone else's. Unfortunately, this small group also has outsize influence in the crypto scene so the concerns of users will probably never get addressed, since they don't matter from that POV.

>This makes it impossible to discuss because this small group's focus is so different from everyone else's.

Well, if people don't value decentralization, there's not much need for them to use Bitcoin. There's a lot of problems that come with decentralization.

I feel this is like comparing car seating to couches. Car seat fans only seem to care about going places! Car seats are small and don't let you lie down? But it gets places! They need a seat buckle and don't let you sit freely? But it gets places! They shake a bit and are usually surrounded by noise? But it gets places!

Some of the complaints can have some incremental improvements, but they're unlikely to be solvable and the fact that someone might rate the complaints highly relative to the goal implies that they're not in the target market for the thing and its large trade-offs.

/overly general point. Some specific responses:

Some of the goals you mention (not useful, massive price fluctuations) are generally only solvable with more people using it. If there were easier more direct solutions, people would've done them.

>Hard for normal people to use?

Most wallet software I've used was super easy. If you want to receive money, you give someone one of your addresses. If you want to send some money, you put in their address. (A billion times easier than figuring out what banking numbers you have to put in to your bank's website to send someone money, and then them worrying about whether that lets you withdraw from their account too.) The main problem is that some wallet clients are full clients that need to download the whole blockchain first, but being patient or switching to a lightweight client solves that.

It was a bit hard to first get bitcoin, but that's because of the hoops companies have to jump through to deal with the banking system. I'm not sure how an open decentralized system can make this part easier. That's up to the exchanges and banks. It doesn't make much sense to blame crypto-enthusiasts for being close-minded and ignoring issues they could work on.

The problem with your analogy is that people understand car seats and couches are and do different things. Crypto enthusiasts seems to want Bitcoin (or something else) to become widely adopted and used but are highly resistant or indifferent to the myriad problems that prevent such adoptions on ideological grounds.

To use your analogy, it would be like someone believing that car seats should replace couches everywhere but ignoring all of the complaints you listed.

>Most wallet software I've used was super easy.

Do you have a technical background such that you are familiar and comfortable with using even complicated technology? I often find that since crypto boosters are developers or engineers, their ideas of simplicity and ease are wildly different from your average Joe.

> if people don't value decentralization, there's not much need for them to use Bitcoin

Correct. That is the reason why most people don't need and will never need bitcoin.

I think decentralization is important. I think the benefits of it should be argued to get people to use Bitcoin, instead of crypto-enthusiasts trying to get people to use Bitcoin because it's "easier" or lower fees, which aren't always true.

If email didn't exist and people mainly used Facebook messages, I'd want to help agitate for something open and decentralized like email to become popular. It wouldn't be because I thought email was easier than Facebook messages. It's because there's benefits to the competition that comes from an open ecosystem.

> It’s the lack of user focus. Setting up a bitcoin account, understanding the security implications, hardware wallet, secret keys, the whole enchilada is too big for an average consumer to digest.

I respectfully disagree. Bitcoin solves problems that the average consumer didn't care about, plus it introduces new problems.

I would never make an everyday purchase with Bitcoin. If I don't get the product I was promised, I can file a dispute with my credit card company. If the product I purchased breaks, it may be covered by a warranty from my card company. If my card number is stolen, I get reimbursed for the fraudulent charges and get a new card in the mail. None of these conveniences come with cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency solved a problem with moving money ~anonymously with no interference from authorities. Most average folks want the exact opposite of that.

>I would never make an everyday purchase with Bitcoin.

I used to think the same, but there is a coffee / snack shop nearby that accepts bitcoin/bcash/ethereum, and offers $1 off if you pay with it. A surprising number of people pay via cryptocurrency.

For a small purchase like that, cryptocurrency is perfect. Amounts are small enough that you don't need to wait for blockchain confirmations, risk is low. Credit card fees are high in-part because they are providing that fraud protection. For a purchase like this, both the merchant and I save money by not having to worry about transaction reversals and fraud.

This is a really good comparison that I had never thought of. You are 100% right, the user experience for BTC is terrible and not likely to get a whole lot better. Even coinbase can be a PITA sometimes, it's really the Ubuntu of the crypto-currency world IMHO.

Also quick question: When was the last time you thought about the swipe-fees for your CC? I'll answer for you: Never. Yet with BTC and other crypto's this is a concern. And please, don't even talk about "Oh it's gotten better with the lightning network" or "The new QRS spec will speed this up", it's really just embarrassing.

Depends on the industry. For very large transactions, like if you are paying a home improvement contractor for something, they will often make you eat the fees if you want to pay with a credit card. So you end up having to figure out where your checkbook is (probably collecting dust in a box somewhere).

I give Bitcoin and LN a continuous pass on UX for now. We're in the infrastructure phase -- growing trust and improving reliability matters far more than UX. Before you know it, there will be 20 years of development and battle-testing behind the tech. The UX can come at any point in the future, while a breach of trust would be fatal. It's a question of ruthless prioritization. Thankfully, the open source devs behind these projects are long-term thinkers, not ponzi-scheme enablers.

Lastly, the UX need not come from Bitcoin/LN. They are a protocol, not a product.

> So you end up having to figure out where your checkbook is (probably collecting dust in a box somewhere).

Are you based in the US? Because almost everywhere else in the world when you say checkbook, people picture movies from the 1970s.

When paying a home improvement contractor, they send me an invoice where they have an IBAN. I point my banks app at it, it pops up a screen where I just type in the amount that I wish to pay (and sometimes it fills that in automatically too), and within 5 minutes the contractor has the money on their account. Neither I nor the contractor pay any fees for this transaction.

That's not limited to large payments such as home improvements, either. I do the same thing to pay the guy who comes to tune our piano; I even did it to pay each of the individual cleaners who did a few hours end-of-tenancy cleaning for us the last time we moved.

Checking my chequebook, I see it's well over a year since I last used it.

It's been 20ish years since local grocery-stores, supermarkets, and most shops stopped accepting cheques in the UK.

I've written less than 50 in my life, mostly for mail-order stuff back 15 years. In the past 15 years I've never even owned a cheque-book, the banks just don't give them out.

Yes. I pay my window cleaner this way.

While I can agree about the lack of user focus, I disagree with the precise way in which lack of user focus is the failure point for both Linux Desktop and Bitcoin.

See, neither of these things can be presented to a user as a tool that can make their lives better, which is what users actually want. Strip away all the hype and math and crypto jargon and what is Bitcoin to someone? An inconvenient currency they can't pay taxes with and have to jump through hoops to use for nebulous benefit. Where did Bitcoin actually find traction amongst users? As a way of transferring money overseas, because it could do it with a lot less hassle than traditional methods.

> See, neither of these things can be presented to a user as a tool that can make their lives better

Did you read the article?

Quoting: "In 2014 a large school of thought suggested that the main breakthrough use case for Bitcoin would be peer to peer transactions. That being customers and businesses paying for goods and services directly between one another without having to rely on payment networks such as Visa."

The use case is certainly for consumers. Direct consumers. Same with Linux Desktop. Just go to Ubuntu.com - what are they pitching?

In my view, there is no question whether there is a lack of user focus. It is one of the major reasons (if not the top reason) for lack of traction.

> That being customers and businesses paying for goods and services directly between one another without having to rely on payment networks such as Visa.

We already have cash for that! It completely ignores the reasons why people use payment networks like Visa instead of just exchanging cash. There are fraud protections, credit, reward points, etc. What bitcoin brings to the table is simply not something very many people actually want for the tradeoffs involved.

I’m with you. They’re not designed for consumer use. The core of the argument of this thread is - these technologies are being marketed and pitched towards consumers despite of what you’re highlighting.

I don't think you are wrong, but in the case of Bitcoin I think a lack of user focus is a secondary problem. The primary problem is that Bitcoin's economics don't work.

If it becomes popular, its nominal value explodes due to deflationary effects. This makes it inconvenient to use for money and rewards speculation and Ponzi type behavior. This drives people away from using it as money and it crashes. Repeat.

Bitcoin was getting some adoption in 2016 and early 2017, but the late 2017 bubble led to many retailers dropping it due to price instability. The late 2017 Bitcoin bubble was actually a deflationary collapse of the currency. After it there were only speculators left holding bags and trying to gradually get out before other speculators realized it was time to get out. That's where we still are today.

Yet today, half the world with computer access uses Linux, directly. And the entire world uses it indirectly.

But ~0% of them know or care that they use Linux, it's either is a functional device for them or has a rebranded OS (Android)

Nobody is disputing that Linux became an overwhelming success.

spectramax was comparing it to Linux on the desktop (which never really became mainstream).

It's branding, it's more about perception than raw usage statistics.

I wouldn't call my Android phone or smart TV a Linux box, and when I browse a website there's no "served by Linux" logo :) end users simply have no idea nor care about any of this.

He's specifically talking about Linux on the Desktop, which is hovering around 2% market share ( http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/... )

It might be that bitcoin is similar to linux - used as a backbone, but not customer friendly enough to ever be used directly by customers. Like maybe banks use it to transfer large amounts of money between each other or something.

Almost 3%, if combined with ChromeOS. IMHO, it is huge success, even if we forget about Linux domination in market of supercomputers, servers, smartphones, and large segment of market in IoT and robotics.

Bitcoin is far far away from such success.

> It might be that bitcoin is similar to linux - used as a backbone, but not customer friendly enough to ever be used directly by customers.

That's my point; I think this is a possible and not unreasonable outcome for Bitcoin.

Bitcoin has a lot of problems which are individually fatal to the whole enterprise. It would be a terrible idea even if it were so intuitive a goldfish could use it.

The other issue which kills wide adoption is price fluctuation.

People using it as a regular currency need their account value to remain what they expect it to be. High viability strongly repels regular users and attracts high risk speculators. And maybe that is a fun outcome but it does make it unusable as currency.

It's still worth accepting on principle of course.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com