How to improve the usability of bitcoin?

[kioicoin]

There is a speculative (investment) presence in the current bitcoin discussion scene. Only known and used by a few people.

If bitcoin really wants to become a universal currency payment system, how can we optimize the design for ease of use and make it easy for most people to get started easily and with low risk?

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There is a speculative (investment) presence in the current bitcoin discussion scene. Only known and used by a few people.

If bitcoin really wants to become a universal currency payment system, how can we optimize the design for ease of use and make it easy for most people to get started easily and with low risk?

Also, if commodities can not be circulated, there is no meaning for their existence. Therefore, this is very important. For the time being, most of them are in the state of holding money, and they have not dealt or circulated.

[Ucy]

There is a speculative (investment) presence in the current bitcoin discussion scene. Only known and used by a few people.

If bitcoin really wants to become a universal currency payment system, how can we optimize the design for ease of use and make it easy for most people to get started easily and with low risk?

Also, if commodities can not be circulated, there is no meaning for their existence. Therefore, this is very important. For the time being, most of them are in the state of holding money, and they have not dealt or circulated.

I guess you want a spending culture, right?  Well, that is up to the owners/holders of cryptocoins or fiats. People should only spend when spending is necessary, or only spend on good things. Forcing others to spend what they own will probably make them spend on things they don't need.
Or we could spend on "good things" alone if spending culture becomes necessary?

[joniboini]

The current implementation is good enough imo. The rate of adoption might not be as fast as other tech but that's simply because there is much freedom in the crypto/bitcoin ecosystem. People need to learn to be their own bank, avoid stupid mistakes, etc which might be suitable only for those who are young or open-mined.

If we put the 10 year age into perspective, what we achieve so far is amazing. What started as a simple experiment has been used by some merchants and users to create their own economy, and that is great.

The spending culture or whatever you talked about will follow when there is enough clarity (either regulation, government stance tc) and exposure to new people, added with an increase of merchants accepting crypto/bitcoin. It will come sooner or later.

[TheUltraElite]

Also, if commodities can not be circulated, there is no meaning for their existence. Therefore, this is very important. For the time being, most of them are in the state of holding money, and they have not dealt or circulated.

Bitcoin though can be circulated. But it does not question the existence. I am not sure how you can get to such a conclusion. Even commodities like wheat, rice can be moved from one owner to another and they still exist. Bitcoin exists in the digital form (so to speak) and they can be sent to other people too.

And bitcoin ownership does not mean that they own fiat directly. They are having bitcoin which are currently at a certain market price which is the selling price if they are sold instantaneously.

To improve usability Lightning Network is the next big thing. We may see more development in future about transaction speed too or other aspects.

[Oasisman]

There is a speculative (investment) presence in the current bitcoin discussion scene. Only known and used by a few people.

If bitcoin really wants to become a universal currency payment system, how can we optimize the design for ease of use and make it easy for most people to get started easily and with low risk?

High volatile nature, transaction speed, and wallet security are just some of the many feature that Bitcoin needs to be improved. Though programmers are constantly working on this to improve the these stuff, specially the Lighting Network that focuses on speeding up the transactions.
It would really take too much time before Bitcoin and cryptocurrency will become fully adapted by the people from all over the world. But, I'm looking forward to the day where Bitcoin can be accepted anywhere you go as an option for payment.

[passwordnow]

I think there's a contrary of what you're asking here. You are asking about two things, usage and risk or volatility.
It's for the people who will use it to understand that bitcoin is risky as an investment if they'll use it like that. But using it the way it was made as a payment, it's very easy to use.

[joeperry]

Optimizing the usage of Bitcoin, ease of use, would primary mean improvement on its prior features enabling people to grasp and gain understanding on the essence of Bitcoin. Its function as a channel of payment is very beneficial for everyone because of its digital form, yet brought by its nature it is automatically risky due to high volatility. As per the adaptation of it globally, it would take long before it gets massive attention from diverse group of people around the world.

[Artemis3]

There is a speculative (investment) presence in the current bitcoin discussion scene. Only known and used by a few people.

If bitcoin really wants to become a universal currency payment system, how can we optimize the design for ease of use and make it easy for most people to get started easily and with low risk?

Bitcoin doesn't want anything, its the people that want it or not. You can buy (or earn) a few satoshis easily and put them in your wallet, very low risk there unless you use insecure malware prone software such as windows, and that's not Bitcoin's fault. Hardware wallets were made to avoid that, and there are of course much better free and open source operating systems everyone should be using.

Speculators exist everywhere. You cannot stop them but they don't have enough power to bend things for too much or too long, the market forces balance themselves very nicely, when lots of people participate.

[20kevin20]

It wants to become the universal payment currency, but it will never be. This is why I support the "digital gold" name of it. It's more of a transferable gold, but one with fixed supply.

Take it as if you were able to pay in gold coins/bars on some websites. The main problem here comes with the possibility of sending a fake gold coin and scamming the service. On the other hand, we have double spending with BTC but counter-measures can be taken. Double-spending aside, Bitcoin is much more safer for services to accept especially because it does not need a physical transfer but only a digital one.

One of the typical reasons services and companies do not accept BTC yet is volatility, and that is understandable. Unless you want to accept and hold BTC while also assuming a risk of negative price change, you'll have to rely on and trust a third party that exchanges your BTC into USD in an instant. Another issue comes with fees during network congestions and tx confirmation time. If all of these would somehow be solved, Bitcoin would be much more practical.

[sheenshane]

There is a lot of solution since then. Bitcoin is currently playing its role in the market already. The Bitcoin doesn't need to be revised and for its risk to be reduced. The solution from that is to build another coin and back it with stable currencies, I mean cracking the bitcoin usability code is a work in progress in the future. That basically it. But those coins can be converted to bitcoin as well and are considered as cryptocurrencies still. (just backed by stable currencies)

Probably, the freelancers job is really great help to increase the usability of Bitcoin since now they eventually used Bitcoin for payment.

[Yatsan]

Optimizing the usage of Bitcoin, ease of use, would primary mean improvement on its prior features enabling people to grasp and gain understanding on the essence of Bitcoin. Its function as a channel of payment is very beneficial for everyone because of its digital form, yet brought by its nature it is automatically risky due to high volatility. As per the adaptation of it globally, it would take long before it gets massive attention from diverse group of people around the world.

The question is how to improve the usability of bitcoin, what are you talking about?

As for what I have noticed for the past couple of years with bitcoin, it cannot surpass the fiat currency in terms of efficiency on daily use because it needs an online connection to be able to use. However I've read some thread here that proposes the usage of bitcoin in offline network through the help of messaging. The idea is clever but a bit off since the bitcoin network all network rather is unavailable when offline.

I would still choose the paper bitcoin over it, although it is quite impossible.

[mk4]

It wants to become the universal payment currency, but it will never be. This is why I support the "digital gold" name of it. It's more of a transferable gold, but one with fixed supply.

Why do you think so? I agree to the SoV narrative of bitcoin, but I believe that it can be both a SoV and a payment currency. It's really not just the best for-payments currency today hence the low payment usage, but it doesn't mean that it will never be ready for payments in the future. It's just going to take a while for the volatility to go down, as it would be very unrealistic to expect bitcoin to have a somewhat stable value this early on.

[hatshepsut93]

Because Bitcoin is decentralized, it will never have the same features that centralized payment systems do - there won't be any tech support that can correct some of your mistakes, there won't be additional verifications for large transactions, there can't be any "I forgot my password" buttons. This is one of the reasons why Bitcoin won't see mass adoption, but I believe despite this all it still has a lot more room for adoption, because people are getting more and more proficient with technology.

Volatility is a bigger problem now, it's the main reason why Bitcoin is viewed as an investment rather than a currency.

[YuginKadoya]

In my opinion, there is no need for improvement on the usability I think we are the one needs to adjust and not Bitcoin we should gain knowledge on the basics of Bitcoin, and there is no safe trading or investment on Bitcoin there is a sure risk but that risk can be lessened if a person would gain experience from getting involved with the volatile market of Bitcoin and other decentralized cryptocurrencies.

[20kevin20]

Why do you think so? I agree to the SoV narrative of bitcoin, but I believe that it can be both a SoV and a payment currency. It's really not just the best for-payments currency today hence the low payment usage, but it doesn't mean that it will never be ready for payments in the future. It's just going to take a while for the volatility to go down, as it would be very unrealistic to expect bitcoin to have a somewhat stable value this early on.

Because realistically, the idea of Bitcoin as payment method will not be that widely agreed. It's okay now that we only have a few services accepting BTC, but if it ever becomes widely used, it will become a problem for authorities.

I understand it could and probably will be modified in time according to what it needs to become a good payment currency, but it just won't work.

By volatility, I did not mean the Bitcoin price has to necessarily be stable in order to be considered a great payment option. If we ever move from fiat to crypto completely as in having the possibility to not only use satoshis (or mBTC) as prices in stores but to also literally live only on BTC (including paying for bills/taxes etc), volatility will basically be over and everyone's money will only have a higher purchasing power as time passes (thanks to halving). This is, however, very unrealistic.

[serjent05]

There is a speculative (investment) presence in the current bitcoin discussion scene. Only known and used by a few people.

If bitcoin really wants to become a universal currency payment system, how can we optimize the design for ease of use and make it easy for most people to get started easily and with low risk?

If we need Bitcoin to become a universal currency payment system, I think bitcoin needs to scale and the confirmation time of each transaction should be greatly improved.  I wanted to see Bitcoin beat XRP in terms of confirmation speed, I don't care whether it is an on-chain or off-chain upgrade as long as it can compete with the world's fastest confirmation time and not compromising security.

[kryptqnick]

There is a speculative (investment) presence in the current bitcoin discussion scene. Only known and used by a few people.

If bitcoin really wants to become a universal currency payment system, how can we optimize the design for ease of use and make it easy for most people to get started easily and with low risk?

I don't think that the main problems with Bitcoin are that people cannot get started easily or have a low risk. Bitcoin is quite user-friendly, IMO, there's nothing that hard in using it. Plus, there're multiple tutorials, safety tips, and stuff. As for the risk, it's not that high IMO, since Bitcoin has proved to grow over time. Plus, it's not like a crash game where something gets busted within a second and is worth zero. If people feel uncomfortable, they can sell anytime and not lose much. The main challenges I see are scalability, lack of trust from the authorities and the giant and powerful banking system.

[abel1337]

Why do you think so? I agree to the SoV narrative of bitcoin, but I believe that it can be both a SoV and a payment currency. It's really not just the best for-payments currency today hence the low payment usage, but it doesn't mean that it will never be ready for payments in the future. It's just going to take a while for the volatility to go down, as it would be very unrealistic to expect bitcoin to have a somewhat stable value this early on.

Because realistically, the idea of Bitcoin as payment method will not be that widely agreed. It's okay now that we only have a few services accepting BTC, but if it ever becomes widely used, it will become a problem for authorities.

I understand it could and probably will be modified in time according to what it needs to become a good payment currency, but it just won't work.

By volatility, I did not mean the Bitcoin price has to necessarily be stable in order to be considered a great payment option. If we ever move from fiat to crypto completely as in having the possibility to not only use satoshis (or mBTC) as prices in stores but to also literally live only on BTC (including paying for bills/taxes etc), volatility will basically be over and everyone's money will only have a higher purchasing power as time passes (thanks to halving). This is, however, very unrealistic.

Right, There isn't much physical store that is accepting bitcoin as of now, Merchants don't want to have a transaction that has delays in confirming that's why in my opinion bitcoin transactions aren't suited for a physical transaction but it's good that some merchant is accepting bitcoin into their store or services.

Volatility is also one of the attributes of bitcoin and some merchants don't really like change of the money they are holding that may cost them a few bucks when the price falls. In the future, we might see more merchants who are accepting bitcoin but I'm not really expecting so much that it will become our main currency in buying and selling physical stuff.

[squatter]

There isn't much physical store that is accepting bitcoin as of now, Merchants don't want to have a transaction that has delays in confirming that's why in my opinion bitcoin transactions aren't suited for a physical transaction but it's good that some merchant is accepting bitcoin into their store or services.

Ultimately, Lightning can provide instant transactions for low value, frequent purchases at brick-and-mortar stores. The costs of merchant integration aren't justified yet until LN adoption is much more widespread. The same was true of credit cards at one point too.

In the meantime, there are apps like SPEDN that merchants can integrate with existing POS terminals. SPEDN uses Gemini to custody cryptocurrency so that merchants can accept it without requiring confirmations.

Flexa co-founder Trevor Filter told CoinDesk the wallet app works at Nordstrom, Barnes & Noble, Express, Lowe’s, GameStop, Office Depot, Regal Cinemas and Jamba Juice, just to name a few.