Making Bitcoin sexy
Bitcoin is an elegant technology — but it needs a face that matches its brain.
Bitcoin is like a high performance engine for money. It’s faster and more efficient than anything that’s come before it. The problem is that this sports car engine has only been available with the body of a bus until now. If Bitcoin is going to take off in the mainstream it needs to be as sexy on the outside as it is within. Those who understand the technology know why it holds so much promise for society, but we have to make it friendlier than it is now for everyone else.
Amongst other things, this means making it fundamentally mobile. The rise of Apple Pay in recent weeks has been another reminder of how the smartphone is going to play a primary role in commerce. If Bitcoin is going to be our money then it needs to live on the wearables and smart screens that are becoming our digital wallets.
At BitX we build Bitcoin products for global use, but our company’s presence in emerging markets in particular has shown us first-hand what mobile will become. In these countries phones are already the de facto primary computing devices. While the rest of the world is focused on ‘digital natives’, the developing world is mobile native.
We designed the BitX Bitcoin Wallet apps for Android and iOS to be the body for Bitcoin’s engine. We wanted to create a user experience that showed Bitcoin off as the no-brainer it is to anyone who understands its complexities. But we also have to join the choir of voices heralding the coming of a better way to do money.
The pre-market challenge
How would you have marketed the internet in the early days before mainstream adoption? The internet is so fundamental to modern society that we take it for granted now and nobody doubts its awesome usefulness — but this was not always true. In fact, there were many detractors in the early days of the internet who didn’t understand the technology, didn’t see the point, and predicted that it would fade into obscurity.
Bitcoin is at a similar stage. A lot of smart and influential people believe in it wholesale, but that’s because they understand it and the potential it holds. People who don’t buy it very often just don’t understand it. As best-selling author Ken Follett has a character remarking in his latest novel Edge of Eternity, “The greater their ignorance, the stronger their opinions.”
Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist and co-author of the first widely used web browser says that conversations currently surrounding Bitcoin remind him of the scepticism that was rife during the early days of the world wide web.
“I’m having déjà vu … [Bitcoin is] weird and scary and nerdy, and it’s full of scams and frauds, just like the Internet was,” he told the Wall Street Journal earlier this year.
So while we work to build the best Bitcoin apps on the planet, we also have to think about educating the market. We worked with Milldance Films to produce a short video about Bitcoin that, we hope, will appeal to mainstream users and drive adoption of our Wallet apps.
The journey with customers begins when they first hear about us, whether on social networks or via a video like this. We’re planning to shoot more in this series and use this as just a first step in the journey for mainstream customers.
The centralisation question
Part of what makes Bitcoin so attractive to those who understand it is the decentralisation it represents for finance. Bitcoin leverages the network of computers that create the blockchain — a public ledger that verifies and records transactions. The blockchain doesn’t rely on any centralised infrastructure and is beyond the control of any regulator or institution.
This is part of the risk inherent to Bitcoin use. If your digital wallet is lost, so are the funds it contains. It can be backed up, or restored from the blockchain itself that holds a record of all your previous transactions, but this can be challenging for less technologically adept users.
Our company addresses this by storing wallets in the cloud on behalf of our customers and in high-security offline vaults where they are beyond the grasp of hackers.
We also provide really good support from real human beings so there is always someone to speak to if our customers need help. We believe this will be important to mainstream adoption of Bitcoin. It offers the best of both worlds — escape from central control and exploitive transaction charges, while also providing human support.
Respecting platforms
When designing our apps we chose to disregard prior art in the Bitcoin space and come up with new paradigms. We separated our thinking between Android and iOS so that both apps would make the best of their respective operating systems and not have the one be a prototype for the other — which is a mistake a lot of application developers make.
For example, Google has put a lot of work into its ‘Material Design’ guidelines that provide best practices in the development of apps for its platform. Android users are not iOS users and we understand the frustration they feel when companies treat iOS apps as templates for what should be done on Android. We wanted to set them apart, and release our apps simultaneously on both platforms and the web.
We had the added complexity of launching our apps during the period as Apple transitions from iOS 7 to iOS 8 on the iPhone, including the introduction of two new screen sizes with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.
So that was the challenge; to make Bitcoin look appealing and feel cohesive with the mobile operating systems supporting our apps, while respecting the differences between those platforms and delivering awesome experiences on both. At the same time we needed to overhaul our website which had been focused on traders in the past. We run Bitcoin exchanges in multiple territories and wanted to honour the users who built the market for Bitcoin and continue to sustain it while still making our service more appealing for people who want to use and store Bitcoin without necessarily trading it.
This is one of the hardest buttons to button for business in the 21st century. Ten years ago we could build for the web — now native development across platforms is the only way to roll. Magic happens in niches, but we had to deliver a platform that speaks to multiple personas. Our businesses are like a dysfunctional family that has to take on multiple new children at once.
Keeping it clean
New technologies are — often incorrectly — perceived as complex and messy to people who haven’t engaged with them yet. This is especially true of Bitcoin which produces glazed stares from many people when an enthusiast tries to explain it to them. Fortunately we now have an excellent documentary to refer people to in the form of The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin.
A complex interface of long address strings and confusing balances won’t do for someone new to using Bitcoin and perhaps already intimidated by the perceived complexity of the currency, which is really beautifully simple once you understand it.
For our apps we aimed for simplicity, which is always the hardest thing to achieve. We created a minimal dashboard for our apps that uses the metaphor of a coin to show balances and make it easy to reference the price of Bitcoin in fiat currencies.
We also take compliance seriously and prioritise KYC (know your customer) processes to mitigate risk. This can be onerous for users, but we designed a simple system that allows you to verify your phone number and name from within our apps. We also have quick buy and sell features in our Android app and we plan to release an entirely separate app dedicated to traders. We enable our customers to submit identity and other documents using their smartphone camera as a scanner. The entire sign up and KYC process is built into our native apps so that customers never need to visit the website.
Bitcoin has been through several trials in recent years and has come out shining every time. We are privileged to be working in an industry with some of the most formidable minds on the planet. It’s exciting to see Bitcoin mature and understanding of it spread far and wide. We will never be done in our quest to create the best possible experience of using Bitcoin. This is just the beginning.
