the ux of bitcoin

Tamim Swaid, nexum AG, Consultant

23.06.2013 Berlin

The UX of Bitcoin

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2005 - Wie funktioniert Geld? – Max von Bock – YouTube

Reviewer: “What Zarlenga elegantly makes clear is that all money has always been a creature of law, i.e. someone decrees it so. As such it is open to abuse and perversion.”

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2007 – Reading about money

- Stephen Zarlenga

- 700 Pages

- Now 100 € - 300 €

2011 – Read first articles about Bitcoins

June 2011 – Exchange rate of Bitcoin in USD

BTCPI $25

BTCPI $300K

laszlo first to buy pizza with Bitcoins agreeing upon paying 10,000 BTC for ~$25 worth of pizza

What I got from the first reading

• Digital Currency

• Created by computers through cryptography

• Sounds like a revolution

Get Bitcoins for free

2011 - Bitcoin.org

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20111 - Mt. Gox

Failed Attempt

Tried to register on two different sites on a sunday

Failed completing the registration

I really don‘t know why – Probably tried to do it while doing other things

First Crash in 2011

Probably you’ll never know exactly why the crash came – at the end it’s a trust game

2012

• Perhaps read one or two articles

Jan 2013 – Omega Tau Podcast

Gavin Andresen

Technical lead at the Bitcoin Foundation

Quite good explanation

Still needed to listen to it several times

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2013 Mt Gox

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2013 bitcoin.de

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Process of buying Bitcoins at bitcoin.de

Register

Connect Bank Account to

bitcoin.de User Account (like PayPal)

Buy and Sell Bitcoins based on

user trust level (Gold, Silver, Bronce)

1 2 3

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My Bitcoins – Getting Rich

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2013 Bitcoin Exchange Rate Today

BTCPI $1Mio

It‘s based on cryptography which is based on mathematics

Before trying new things people want to understand them.

Bitcoin is quite hard to grasp

Look at the Transfer Adress:

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UX Flaw No. 1 – Understanding it.

Bitcoin is the Linux of money

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UX Flaw No. 2 – The Adress

Bitcoin: 1DJFT3pLArWFGT4gatqTPWcRufuv4y1Barh

E-Mail: yourmail@gmail.de

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Receiving Bitcoins on Computer – Like the first E-Mail

The position of the government towards people trading, buying and selling bitcoins is unclear.

Would you work for bitcoins?

What about taxes?

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UX Flaw No. 3 – Legality

§?

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Banks already starting to resist

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UX Flaw No. 4 – What to do with Bitcoins

Exchange

Financial Investment

Online Casino

Payment

Volatil

Volatil and for what?

Satoshi Dice 3,6 Mio Bets

Never underestimate the power of the believers

Mistrust in other currencies and trust in Bitcoins - In no one we trust

Mining Computers are beeing build and sold – Hashing Power?

The difficulty Level for mining is getting higher

People are innovating, writing software, building devices with the an incentive – Different then just open source software (number of developers)

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The Bitcoin Believers - The Communiy of Trust

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Bitcon Miners

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Bitcoin network has the power of 1039.79 petaflops

Applying the 12,700 flops per hash rate to the leading supercomputers shows the top 10, with a combined speed of 48 petaflops, have just 5 percent the muscle of today’s bitcoin network, according to The Genesis Block. Even adding in the remaining 490 most powerful supercomputers achieves just a fraction of what the bitcoin network can do.

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ATM Machines for getting Bitcoins

Attendee Evan Rose fed two $20 bills into the machine and saw the bitcoins hit his digital wallet within seconds.

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Hardware devices like the TREZOR that cannot be infected by malware will make holding bitcoins as easy and secure as holding paper money. They are an exciting step in the evolution of Bitcoin from an experiment for geeks to a payment system anybody can use.

Lock your Bitcoins in a specialized hardware lock

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VC‘s investing in Bitcoin Companies

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From the start of May until June 4, China soared to the top of the charts, surpassing even the US. During that period, Chinese addresses accounted for just over one quarter of all downloads of the original Bitcoin client. The US had a still-respectable 21.94 percent.

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130 Developers working on bitcoin

Read: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/whos-building-bitcoin-an-inside-look-at-bitcoins-open-source-development

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Others also started very small

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Thank You Tamim Swaid

@tamimat