#1 A Milestone Update: Bitcoin Design Foundation Grantee and What's Next
It's been a while. I've got some news to share, including a grant announcement and a progress update on projects I'll be focusing on in the next three months.
Hey friends,
It's been a while since I last wrote and shared anything. My apologies, as life has gotten quite hectic. My focus remains on Bitcoin. In the past year and a half, I've delved into studying Ecash on Bitcoin and its potential to significantly improve custodial payments online. If you've been following me on Twitter or other platforms where I'm more active, you might have noticed some of my contributions and detailed design posts.
I'm thrilled to announce that I've been chosen as the first grant recipient from the Bitcoin Design Foundation. This grant entrusts me with integrating Ecash into the Bitcoin Design Guide. I'm honored and excited to merge these two passions of mine. Below is the official announcement from the Bitcoin Design Foundation.
If you're in the Bitcoin Design Discord, you may have come across Erik and his design contributions to eNuts, which is a wallet for the Cashu protocol. He regularly shares his design work and asks for feedback, and also participates in the larger community in different ways. Check out his talk about usability and design at Baltic Honeybadger 2023.
Cashu is a Chaumian Ecash system for bitcoin, one of the two well-known implementations next to Fedimint. Ecash can potentially play an important role in the bitcoin ecosystem next to the base chain, lightning, and other layers, due to its low fees, transaction speed, and privacy properties. Ecash mints are centralized around individuals or federations, which can be both a useful property (self-sovereignty of trusted groups), but also a security problem. Good design can help users navigate these dynamics better, avoid pitfalls, and focus on simply using bitcoin as money.
The grant will support Erik on continuing his work on eNuts, help bring more awareness to Ecash in the ecosystem and design community, and gather best practices for Ecash UX in the Bitcoin Design Guide.
We are excited to follow along.
Week 1 Updates
I want to share some ideas and plans for my work with this grant. I've spent the week drafting a brief timeline, suggesting ideas and activities, and starting to recruit developers for UX research interviews. These will contribute to the Ecash section of the Bitcoin Design Guide.
Timeline and Activity Planning
I've been brainstorming a general timeline and community activities I aim to align and organize through my grant. My goal is to complete the Ecash guide and submit a pull request by the end of June. Below is a detailed roadmap with some ideas I've come up with.
*Note: timeline and roadmap are subject to change.
Design Guide Fork and Branch Setup via Github
I've set up a fork where I've cloned the existing Bitcoin Design Guide Repo and created a new branch named Ecash. In this branch, I've started structuring what will become the Ecash section pages. The Ecash branch will serve as a working copy of the guide, with regular commits pushed to this branch. Since it's publicly available on GitHub, anyone can track progress and offer suggestions.
User Research: Developer Interview Planning
I aim to connect with Ecash developers to understand the concepts they find complex to explain or difficult to integrate into user-friendly designs. These insights will shape my brainstorming for the Ecash best practices section of the guide. I've created a survey and reached out to a few Cashu developers I've worked with over the last 1.5 years, also sharing the survey with the Fedimint community in their Discord's #ux channel.
That's all for this update. Thank you for reading. I plan to regularly update my progress here and rekindle my writing habit. I have a trip to Hong Kong planned in May that I'm eagerly anticipating, albeit with some reservations. I'll share more thoughts on this in a future post.
Cheers,
Erik