#128 A minute

It's been.

Almost 2 months and no post, I am clearly slacking. Sort of. Right after the last post, I went on vacation with the family for ~3 weeks. The week after was straight up all about preparing for Presidio Bitcoin Design Week, then I need a breather after that, then hopped back into work, and now here we are.

So, the design week was great. Check out the review post. Planning and preparation was a ton of work, huge thanks to Mo and Mat for carrying a lot of that. For me, the week was jam-packed with preparing talks, conversations, and of course the events themselves. I really liked our theme of “Design future money”, which does not start with bitcoin already as the best thing ever, but at a higher level that pushed us to think what money is, how it works, and how it can be improved. And of course we still dug deep into various bitcoin topics. But check out the review post, I think it’s a great summary.

I also had a chance to join Stacie and Matthew on The Bitcoin Layer podcast with Nik Bhatia. Really enjoyed his approach to teaching about bitcoin - starting with the tech. That might be a friction point for some, but people should understand what they are investing in (whether it’s time or money). His audience is traders, and I assume it’s the same if those traders invest on other things. You have to do your due diligence. Doesn’t mean you have to read every single line of code, but the primitives and mechanics of the tech are important to grasp.

Also started working on a new release for Bitcoin Icons. There were a few requests on Github, then I asked around on social media and Discord, and also clicked through a few wallets to see if anything was missing. Then made a first draft and shared it. My instinct was to stay away from literal references (faucet, mining pool, dice) and either go more abstract or focus on the action, but someone said they prefer the literal approach. Maybe I’ll include both. But I’ll just mock up both and see what everyone prefers.

Also just posted an issue for creating a “graduated wallet” reference design earlier. I like how pragmatic the concept is, keeping really small amounts in custodial or trusted layers, and bugging users to “graduate” to self-custody as appropriate. It accommodates the reality of how quickly fees can make transaction uneconomic, while also clearly positioning self-custody as “the goal” and proper way of doing things.

While early discussion on that is going on, I want to do a review of the Daily spending wallet reference design and make sure it’s up-to-date with best practices, and then see if I can work with projects to get a few things implemented. Lightning is maturing, and I think there’s a lot of nuance in implementation for it to really work well for end-users.

For the Bitcoin Core App, current focus is build system, test automation and release process. Nothing I can help with. But after that we’ll get back to building out the UI and I am excited to get hands-on with that.

I also spent a good amount of time on the foundation. Mostly doing research on changing up our legal entity to be more capital efficient. That’s going to be a discussion in our upcoming board meeting, and probably a bunch of behind-the-scenes work in the next months.

Also had a nice call with the Figma community team to give feedback on how I/we use their tools, iterated on the product positioning framework, worked on the newsletter (to go out next week), and got invited to an X Space about Open Design next Friday.

Things are back in swing. It helps that I declined all conference participation for the rest of year. Really need to focus now on things (especially on crucial stuff like the foundation entity), and keep the momentum going.

That’s it for now. Have a good weekend.

✌️🇺🇦