Bitcoin Forum

Our standard answer to people saying that Bitcoin is too complicated used to be, " Bank customers do not need to know how the internet ledgers of a bank work, to use their service " but now with the introduction of things like UASF people have to approach their merchants and exchanges and services to figure out what services will be safe to use, depending on what route those services will be going with this scaling option.

Are we over complicating Bitcoin for non-technical users of this technology? < They have no clue what chain split and soft forks are, and should they be that involved? >

Our goal should be to make it very simple for Granny to understand and to grow adoption. ^hmmmmmm^

Imagine if the reserve bank issued 2 different types of $1 notes and one type of note was accepted at specific merchants and not at other. This will create a lot of confusion with the general public.

Example : https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6e25yx/im_investing_on_bitcoin_for_some_time_but_what/

We're hitting a time where the average person wants to learn about cryptocurrencies in 24hrs while it has taken us years of building, understanding, and planning.

The good news is this transition is now happening to be able to adopt change on a mass scale and although it may seem complex for them all the kinks will work their way out soon enough leading to a seamless and understandable foundation.

The thing is people should not have to have such a steep learning curve to use this technology. The more choices you give them, the longer they will take to grasp the concept. Keep it simple and they will adopt it quicker. The developer should always be focused on what the customer/client wants and not what looks good or feels good to him or her. ^grrrrrr^

If you do make such complex changes, it must be well documented and widely distributed in the most simple explanation possible. Even long time Bitcoiners are struggling with the new suggestions being proposed. 

Ive been in the space for quite some time and am currently quite confused as to the current state of affairs regarding scaling. Can someone point me in the right direction?

Does the Bary Silbert agreement hold any weight?

If so, then why all this UASF talk?

Just imagine a newbie trying to grab hold of wtf is going on.

Not true, 99% of all people involved in crypto can't even communicate in the society properly, I'm one of them. all we really care is the ability to keep our coins safe in our wallets, ability to do transactions without delays and dramas. I really don't care what happens behind the scenes all I care is to know my coins hold any value and that there are some people around the world willing to buy and sell to me with a reasonable price.
All I care is to know that I'm able to send bitcoins to any address and receive to any address but if one day I send some coins to someone and they say they didn't receive and my coins disappear somehow, that's when I kiss bitcoin good bye.

Then my statements are true for you too. If you are worried about the security of your coins, then you should know where to store them and what coins to buy and to sell. By the look of things after the 1st of Aug 2017, you might have a Chain split with legacy coins and whatnot. < You will have to make choices on your existing coins & coins you are going to buy >

You might even have to find out what type of coins are accepted at which merchant or service where you are storing or using your coins. < These Hard forks and/or soft forks are causing a lot of confusion with people >  ^grrrrrrr^

Updates need to happen whether people find them convenient or not.  When nothing happens, demand grows too high and that's what pushes the mainstream away from decentralisation right into the hands of Vitalik Buterin.

Better that it happens now than when Bitcoin actually has adoption.

If you look at terms and conditions for most websites/merchants accepting Bitcoin - it actually doesn't seem very complicated: "Deposits are instant" or "They will reflect after approximately 15 minutes, sometimes up to an hour". These were inadequate even a year ago and certainly now with the increasingly long average waiting times.

I think you're right: people should be able to dive right in and use it, without needing to understand what the appropriate fee amount is. They shouldn't need to search for explorers to understand how much they are getting and which part was spent as fees.

I'm not saying Bitcoin tech is too complicated - quite the opposite. But usability can be improved a LOT. Trying to talk about the blockchain, miners, confirmations, mempool etc. is difficult enough to breakdown into simple English but you have to be in the shoes of a merchant trying to localise Bitcoin usage (in Malay, it is just horrible) to realise just what a challenge it can be.

We're in the very beginning of BTC adoption. I remember 30 years ago when people used to say "in the future we'll need to know how to use computers" and by "to know" they mean knowledge about coding in a very non userfriendly ambient. And them Apple, Microsoft, the mouse, plug&play and so on was created... and things went very easy, so nobody need to really know about computers, people just use it (and do a lot of dumb things, of course, because they don't know the technology in deepness). So, in my opinion, we'll reach a moment when cryptos will be very user friendly and that will depend on some smart guy like Wozniak, Jobs or Gates to create friendly ways to use crpytos.

no. it should not be simplified when there are potential issues like this and all the other things like correct security, change addresses and fee variance and on and on. there is no bank to come and bail you out.

to pretend you're not taking your finances into your own hands with the possibility for things to go wrong is not helpful.

It can't be simplified. Because the elements in the system are complicated. So we should do continuous learning. It's the time of begining of adoption of bitcoin.

The end user should not see the difference. If a bank changed it's ledger system, you as the client should not be bothered by the changes. < Suddenly faced with choices that you do not understand > Bitcoin is a global technology and it is used in some 3rd world countries with educational challenges.

Bitcoin developers should hide the technical side, and mimic the ease of use these people have with cash. Why would these people adopt a technology/currency that they do not understand?

Science is simplicity. Once you can't describe a subject for average audience comprehensively, I assure you: definitively you have not a clue about it.

Cryptocurrency?
Easy! It is  consensus about a public ledger (prepared and maintained by everyone who wishes to participate) plus a little tweak, contributing to this process (book keeping) deserves reward and this reward is just another article added to the ledger by the participant/accountant which here is called 'miner',  ...

See? It is not too complicated and I have seen very ordinary people catching up almost easily with the concept.

UASF?
Easy! If at some point some accountants may decide to change the protocol while others may not follow the proposed changes, there will be two versions of the ledger, two coins eventually. A mess in the very first days, better to remain calm in the event then choose your prefered ledger/coin after the storm, or even use both as you may have records in both ledgers at the same time! You know there will be no dispute about the past it is just about the future and future is formed by your choices through your transactions and not the protocol and the accountant/miners whom their business is registering the events ...

See? Every scientific or technical subject can be described simply and comprehensively if and only if it is understood by the teacher, beforehand.

Basically this technology makes the renewal of the era.
The old bank system will be replaced by something we can manage on our own with more advanced knowledge.
Whether learning is complicated, it all returns to our curiosity about the renewal itself.

I don't think people are trying to make it any more complicated than it already is...unfortunately its a complicated system, but there are way of trying to explain it in more layman terms


Agreed, when you are trying to explain it, making it accessible to those without as much background is great, but that isn't always easy

I think the services will make it less complicated. The exchanges has already said that most of them will support both the legacy coins and the

new BIP148 coins, if there are a Coin split. {Well most of them} I think the choice and decision making will be a bit tricky for the users, but once

this has been implemented for a while, things will become more familiar. There is always a bit of a learning curve with new ideas.  ::)

FTFY

I think Bitcoin is a great piece of technology that introduced us to Blockchains and we should see it that way, using bitcoin regarding it's limitations is inefficient and eventually the Market will found out about that.

I have read all the posts here thoroughly thanks to his guidance which has overcome my doubts which may be because I myself make bitcoin hard to understand.

A centralized advocacy group (bringing all cryptos together), and proper education to the "normies" would go a long way. Something to bridge the gap between "us" and "them"

We have tried this before and it was called The Bitcoin Foundation. It started with honorable intentions and then money got involved. In the end ego's and greed took over and the funding dried up for that initiative. ^grrrrrr^ Nope, this will not work to solve this problem. We need large scale education about these changes and Press involvement way in advance. A spokes person from the Core developers should actively engage directly with the Press to get the message out. < Gavin did this, but then it went to his head >

We also need to speak from one mouth. ^hmmmmm^

No, but the blockchain needs to get improved fast.
Do we need more exit nodes for example? To speed up transactions?

from where i'm sitting almost every single person involved in that was either an asshole, criminal and usually both.

i'm sure there were a few people in it for the right reasons but they were always in a minority.

We are not over complicating bitcoin. It's just that some non tech-savvy people are trying to understand a quite complicated technology.

People don't need to understand it, just trust it; but yea understanding it is a big plus and a big knowledge advantage.

Laymen people don't under the internet or the world wide web either, but they still use it. It should be the same for bitcoins.

For the person with some average techical knowledge Bitcoin is not that much complicated unless you want go realy deep in the system. But people would like to becom experienced profitable traders over night and understand everything about Bitcoin just in a few days. That is not how the things are working and it takes time. But it's essential to understand basic principles.

Understanding bitcoin and understanding the value of a currency are very different IMO. Blockchain technology and the market that encompasses cryptocurrencies are two very different fields, so I would be careful combining them

Couldn't have put it better myself!

Nope. Any version is a version and will be considered valid by people who use it (being minority or not) ... it is fundamental do not mess with fundamentals please. We are trying to teach newbies here not to make them more confused, for the god sake ::)

People who are determined to run a fork will do it and once it has been done, they don't care how many votes they have. They just stick to their balances and newly mined coins being named whatever.

Actually you have a big and quite legit point. When I started with Bitcoin I was then facing a blank wall and even up to now there are still so many things I don't understand as I am considered as a very technically-challenged guy. Coupled with information overload and opposing opinions we can all read around, it can sometimes be very confusing as if I am getting drowned in a sea of data.

However, there are some things that may not be easy to simplify though I would very much welcome an effort to make things easier to grasp. Technical matters can be given more understanding by connecting them with things ordinary guys are used to seeing and using. The question then is who can make these things for us?

Right now, I am still continually learning new things on cryptocurrency and now can even do some trading in a popular trading site. At least I could proclaim that am not a newbie in cryptocurrency anymore but definitely not yet approaching an expert position.

For now, no. We can't describe it in any simpler way for now. Maybe in the future no one will care Bitcoin from technical side since Bitcoin is going to be used in parallel with fiat.

Even myself have been involved on cryptocurrency for how many years i do have still some questions on my mind remained unanswered specially on technical aspects on Bitcoin,im still confused and still studying on it also to other altcoins in the market. Telling other people about bitcoin directly on technical aspects then i would say they wont really put interest at all since they dont have any idea on what you are saying thats why as a bitcoin user and do really concer on adoption progress then explaining to individuas on simple aspects of BTC would somehow help but only on small scale. The best move is to make organization or group on your place which do conduct some seminars or other stuffs that do make exposure on bitcoins existence and its usage/capabiities.

Bitcoin is for a fact overcomplicated. For some reason, it is still very difficult for complete noobs to purchase in under 10 minutes, whereas anyone can buy stuff from Amazon with 1-click... using a traditional credit card.

We are just actually having the side-effects of information overload. What we should do is not to hide those technical things which can be hard to grasp by ordinary people (just like me!) but create an educational system where complicated things can be downsized in pieces which we can all bites. In other words, there must be a way to simplify things for the sake of newbies while not withdrawing the chance for the advanced learners to satisfy their cravings.

I mean, this must be something for everyone if we have to make the adoption of Bitcoin truly global so that a teenager can have Bitcoin as well as a grandmother who can be 94 years old already. Bitcoin is really for all types of people regardless of age, race, sexuality or whatever they may have under their pockets.

I do understand your concern what will all crazy jargon related to Bitcoin...it can sometimes be a little dizzy wading through with those terms. 

It seems to be the reason for most of the confusion - a streamlined crypto-focused social network could greatly assist this.

Bitcoin being decentralised will remain a chaos. Just because it is decentralised, for making any major change we need to have a majority which is not the case in centralised currency. A central authority has the major right and changes could be made without anybody knowing anything. But in Bitcoin, everything is transparent and open to discussion. This over complicate things because people start speculation. On one hand this is advantage but on other it creates confusion in not tech people. But I think bitcointalk or a just a google search can help people to solve their problems regarding all the new chaos and confusion related to technical aspects.

Bitcoin being a technology inclusive currency. I think we can't really escape from technical aspects of it. We as a community should help each other and make the situation clear for non tech people and we at the most part are doing that.

It has to definitely be community driven.

How buying or using Bitcoin is overcomplicated. You just need to enter the amount you want to buy and click a "Buy" button. If it was years ago where not a lot of payment methods were offered, or with a fastidious process ok. But now I don't see how we could make it more fast and easy to buy some BTC. There are all of payment methods offered, wallets so easy to use that a baby could do it with one hand and the other with a baby bottle

Hard to say. In my opinion, we're using a technology far before its time.

A great way of putting it is to think of blockchain technology as a 22nd-century mainstream take up. The internet was invented 34 years ago (1983) and we're still performing large scale upgrades to it constantly and making it better. Australia is performing large-scale national upgrade. They're half way through upgrading the country, and yet when they plan to finish (in a few years time) the technology will already be deprecated and will need another upgrade!

Bitcoin was not made to scale as easy as newer blockchains are, mainly because newer applications knew the problems they had to overcome by looking at Bitcoins mistakes. I trust the minds behind the Bitcoin development community and believe what they are doing is right, as a hard fork would have been a very hard decision to go forward with.

The blockchain still has a very long way to go to be perfect. Transactions still take minutes, which is far too slow for a mainstream adoption for large applications such as databases and storage. But until then, we can keep innovating, challenging and questioning the technology to help perfect it.

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The problem with the overcomplication is it is only overcomplicated if a person does not seek the knowledge to understand the intricacies of Bitcoin.

I am not saying that people should all just dedicate their lives to trying to understand Bitcoin, however, if you are going to be owning the token then you should understand how it works.

If we applied this exact same principle to the fiat money we all use today, no one would ever use banks because they would see the system for what it is.

So, the message is, overcomplication is actually a good thing because it drives people to learn and understand as opposed to just sitting and listening to others that are deemed 'more intelligent', instead of raising one's own intelligence so that they do understand. If we don't force ourselves to learn and innovate we are not moving forward and away from the same corrupt and flawed system, we have today.

Knowledge is power and power is derived from intelligence. If you do not make yourself uncomfortable you will never grow as a person.

I don't think we're overcomplicating Bitcoin. You don't need to know a whole lot about hard forks and UASF to continue using it as a regular user - as a regular user all you need to know is that there are certain timeframes where it may be wise to avoid making transactions. The details behind it don't really matter. You can get involved, but you don't have to. However that you can get involved is one of the greatest privileges of crypto. Getting involved in traditional banking is a tad bit harder.


I personally am not fully convinved of the scalability of newer blockchains yet. Most of them have to reach Bitcoin level transactions yet, and those who have, even if just for a short time, didn't scale so well either. (I'm looking at you, Ethereum)

I do agree with your comment, but i do also know that many people out there are really interested in knowing how bitcoin works and whats behind this so called new technology for the common person.
The question is if there is a way to simplify the way people will understand the whole tech, most people only hear about the gains other people made with bitcoin but they are still completely unfamiliar with it.

The basic ideas behind cryptocurrency are not that difficult to
understand by non-technical people, although it demands a kind
of change of thinking to let it truly sink in.

I think we are in the early days and Bitcoin is just an opening
shot for the evolution. We'll have second generation of cryptos
that are much more simpler, more anonymous and more scalable.

That would be incredibly nice, but I'm afraid that simplicity / anonymity / scalability will be at odds with each other for a pretty long time, especially when combined with decentralization / trustlessness / security. It already took a paradigm shift to bring the latter 3 together, not sure what it will take for the next step to occur.

Well, there will always be a technical aspect to Bitcoin. However, on just the consumer side, it is a simplified version of Bitcoin. You do not necessarily need to have a huge amount of knowledge to be able to use bitcoin as a transaction method. Just send and receive through wallets such as coinbase or blockchain. They simplify the whole network down enough to an easily understandable level.

I do not think that we are over complicating bitcoin as there are a large amount of people that want to know about the blockchain network and how that works. As the popularity is increasing, so will its knowledge. Cryptocurrencies will be the future, so it makes sense for people to learn about it at an 'early' stage.

BTC first of all we must known that to create our wallet and which coin is wanted to invest and which is store in their wallet.some non technical users of bitcoin technology they are create their state more complicated.BTC

The current situation is nothing short of a mess, but it's an uncommon situation. And not only you have to deal with potential BIP148 coins, but potential segwit2x coins... this is just nuts. We need to get rid of the current situation and congregate in only one bitcoin or else people are going to get tired and dump. Nobody wants to deal with several tokens.

Have a look at this (https://github.com/ignopeverell/grin/blob/master/doc/intro.md).

Agreed, but Segwit2x is looking pretty strong at the moment. If this trend continues, we will not have much of a decision. I guess the majority has

already spoken and people will just follow the longest chain. In many instances, we worry about things that never happens, but we prepare for it in

any way. { Take insurance as an example - Most of the stuff you pay for never happens, but when it happens you are covered. }  ;)

not really :'( :'(

You are like that not me every person has his own way.

Same is the problem here with me and many others who got in investors into bitcoins as mediators.
The people who bought in at $2500 because of me, are now asking as to why is this bitcoin getting doomed without any specific reasons. They just googled out and found about segwit2x as well as chain split and soft forks and they even tried to understand the terms but unable to, so they came to me asking about the same as to what is all this about? I tried my best to make them understand but even I was not capable to catch their attention to it and they went off asking me to give them a deadline that till when will bitcoins be back at those prices again. They think I cheated them, but I thought that prices might touch 4k USD based on the scalability issues' news which were coming as resolved few days back. This is not going to be easy and need to wait with fingers crossed and see what happens this August.

I think bitcoin was born beautiful and difficult to use for over 80% of the people.
To average person the biggest complication comes when they want to transfer a fraction of bitcoin.
People are used with un divisible units of fiat, the smallest 1/100(cent) Now inagine you ask them to send you 0.000974123 Btc. I am saying this because I tried to convince someone to use btc. He couldn’t get it, let alone volatility
Could we have a wallet were it shows and send/receive satoshies. it will be good for the eye too.

That's... surprisingly concise. Thanks for the link! It raises some questions (or rather I still need to wrap my head around cut-through blocks) but seeing how there's a concrete implementation in the works you just gave me a new rabbit hole to dive into.



Umm... you can actually do that already. Bitcoin Core: Settings > Options > Display > Unit to show amounts in: BTC / mBTC / μBTC

I'm pretty sure most other modern software and hardware wallets have similar settings available.

I think a lot of people are saying it's too hard to know that it is a lie and I am one of the people who answered the bitcoin it is true.

A large percentage of Bitcoin buyers and holders can be feeling the same thing now that we are in the "chaotic" stage of Bitcoin...when the scaling solution will soon be implemented. It is not helping that many news about the possible split are mostly geared to people who have already the basic understanding about all of these technical jargon bombarding us everyday.

Personally, there are so many things I also don't get fully that is why I just prefer to have a watch and see attitude regarding the August 1 deadline. I would accept whatever that can come out from this whole Bitcoin adventure. If there is one thing I am hoping for it is that possibility that after August 1 and when the dust has already settled Bitcoin can get back to the growth track.

THANK YOU , I never installed a BTC core, only third parties light wallet due to hardware i got.  And imagine i was trying to teach someone else. But we learn as long as we live .

Chaotic? No, it's more dramatic than just creating chaos alone because it's being spread wrongly through the media that Bitcoin could doom till certain levels and even end up. We all know Bitcoin could never die, but the newer the people are regarding it, more scared will they be about the same. And about the dust part, I too think that it is all being done to settle down things as well as the "pump" that took place and took Bitcoins to $3000, but I think we should see not less than 1500 and be back above 2500 (my investors' buy level) at least.

I believe so, I believe bitcoin will evolve when it stays as is and survives for a long time

You're welcome. One voice that gets rarely heard these days
is the one belonging to the people who actually use crypto for purchases.

And the other one is of course, the merchants. We're all waiting
for the p2p e-cash revolution that was foreseen by Satoshi Nakamoto.

I think Bitcoin is a great piece of technology that introduced us to Blockchains and we should see it that way, using bitcoin regarding it's limitations is inefficient and eventually the Market will found out about that.

Better that it happens now than Bitcoin actually has adoption.

Well, basically everything improvement should be easy to accept as long as it doesn't occur any worries in the users of btc itself.
Is not this still a matter of debate itself.

Don't think over 80% people feel difficult to use bitcoin, it is actually the other way round in my opinion. It's actually much easier than using fiat when doing smaller transactions. You just paste the amount of btc you have to send, be it a fraction and press send. That's it.

basically we doesn't need much knowledge to understand bitcoin. just learn how to creating it, private securing, loading and where to using it.

One’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

All youngsters find it very easy to send received the bitcoin. Infact they also understand the functioning of bitcoin and how beneficial it could be in coming time. Though it could be complex for non technical people on the platform on which bitcoin is based.

i understand your point here
good explanation
some people just wants to earn instant and wants to skip the process of understanding things
and just rely on spoon feeding
bitcoin has given big profit to many people who has knowledge but also the rise of many greed people who wants profit at once whos in the end hurt only themselves in money aspect...

I agree to what you have quoted, that bank users doesnt have toknow how the ledger works to use their service and so with the bitcoins. If we want to make bitcoin more known and adaptable, we should make it less complicated for people who has no IT or technological knowledge. BUT requiring it to be simpler means more complicated algos for developers. This complicated systems are for those who are behind the curtains.  If we are to promte cryptos, specifically bitcoins, we should keep it simple in the surface.

I agree especially for consumers. A consumer making a purchase they do not want to jump tru hoops and have complications. They want to click a button and 3 sec later have a sign that says "Thank You" "We Appreciate Your Business". They don't want stuck transactions, 3-hour waits, figuring out where to hide private keys on their insecure windows 8, ,,,

I deal with non-tech people everyday, they do not want to know about about the inner workings they just want to click a button and have it work. Just like we don't want to open the hood of our car every time we start it. We just want turn the key and go.