No2x: Centralized Services

I just got back from a week in England. One of the most pleasant experiences was ordering a couple pints at the pub and taking out my iPhone and with two clicks of my thumb paying for the beers. No worries about changing money, whether my credit card would be accepted, letting the card company know I would be traveling, exchange rates, etc… ApplePay was pretty much close to the optimal user experience.

I hope I’ll be able to use Bitcoin like that some day. What would it take for Bitcoin to compete with this user experience? We’re all aware of the issues around long inter-block times and the risks of zero-conf. But it’s perfectly reasonable that we’ll have third party services that require limited trust to solve these problems. Cost is of course an issue, but it’s likely costs can be kept low even in a limited block size world once there are sufficient higher layer mechanisms in place.

I think the primary concerns are time and effort. Second layer solutions like lightning are still in development and are untested, it’ll take years for these technologies to really mature. And any startup in the space faces an exponentially rising complexity in building their services if they can’t just dump transactions on the block chain directly. Without question, larger block size will make life easier for some of these companies, at least in the short run.

But we aren’t building Bitcoin for the next few years, or to get rich quick on the next unicorn or the rising price of Bitcoin. We’re building it for the future.

And at the end of the day, what does society stand to gain from Bitcoin having a similar user experience? The marginal room to improve on ApplePay is virtually nil. Maybe paying with Bitcoin can be made as good as that or whatever other payment innovations are on the horizon from more traditional sources. But Bitcoin will just be one more option to achieve the same thing.

And it will always be far harder to build that experience on top of Bitcoin than using a traditional centralized service. Centralization makes things easy! We should be careful prioritizing easy Bitcoin payments at the potential expense of Bitcoin as uncontrollable store of value. We can have our cake and eat it too, but we must preserve the properties of decentralization first, even if it takes longer to have the slick payment app.