The Bitcoin curse

You must be proud of yourself.

The three tiles in Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre. Source: Wikimedia commons

For the past few months, maybe years, you have been learning all that you could about Bitcoin. Finally, you know a lot. I mean, a LOT about Bitcoin.

• You can tell your hashes from your Merkle roots; a private key from a public key.
• You could talk for hours about the advantages of proof of work and the perils of proof of stake.
• You finally understand what the heck an elliptic curve is, and why Diffie-Hellman should be in the pantheon of earthly gods.
• You know why reusing addresses is worse than killing puppies and also that the Man In The Middle is not somebody that will ruin your relationship, but someone that will steal your bitcoins.

I could go on, and on with the list of things you’ve learned watching countless talks, reading medium articles, maybe you’ve even read the original white paper from Satoshi himself.

So know you think you can finally convince anyone why Bitcoin is the best invention since slice bread.

Well… you can’t!

Sadly, you have become an expert. You have crossed the Rubicon, so now there is no turning back. You have learned so much about so many arcane concepts, that you are irremediable separated from a common human being.

You have fallen under the curse of expertise.

You are part of a select group of individuals that have invested so much time and effort getting to know this wonderfull technology that you are incapable of communicating with regular people. It is even possible that you feel disdain for those individuals that aren’t willing to make the same level of effort to learn about Bitcoin as you did.

Well… you are wrong!

Bitcoin is not meant only for those of us that enjoy math puzzles and rise to every intelectual challenge.

The first users of radio were electronic enthusiasts that assembled their own devices, could distinguish a Yaggi antena from a dipole and enjoyed the technology for the sake of itself.

They were a necessary first step. But they didn’t make radio the mass phenomenon it would become years laters. Regular people did. People that didn’t know more about the internals of their radio devices than you do about the internals of your car’s carburetor.

The success of radio, tv, dvd, … was built on ignorance, not expertise.

It isn’t until a technology -any technology- is easy enough for regular people to use it, that it becomes a widespread success.

Getting more people aboard the Bitcoin train is not about teaching them everything that you know. It is about making sure that they don’t need to learn that much to use it productively.

That is where easypaysy fits in.

Bip58 addresses, bech32 addresses, QR codes,… all of that must go for Bitcoin to succeed. And by succeding I mean for Bitcoin to be accessible to 99% of the people in the planet.

What is the absolute minimum somebody needs to know about Bitcoin to be able to use it securely:

I am gonna argue that, in order to use Bitcoin safely, in the near future you’ll only need these three things:

1. Buy and configure a secure hardware wallet, preferably one with integrated WIFI and a nice screen.
2. Write down and store securely the 12 BIP39 words of your wallet.
3. Write down and share your easypaysy ID that your hardware wallet will show every time you turn it on. Such as btc@alpha-rally.box/lion

That is all you need to tell your friends. Bitcoin is a Swiss bank in your pocket. (I know it is much more, but let’s just start with that, ok?)

Open a Bitcoin account, keep your 12 secret words safe, and send and receive money from your easypaysy account as easily as you use your email, only way more secure.

We are not there yet, but we are getting closer, visit www.easypaysy.org to see the future of Bitcoin, where everybody fits, not just the experts like you!