I was at Offscript most of last week, hanging out with lots of super nice Web3 designers and just got back yesterday late afternoon. As the only person working on bitcoin, it was interesting to see where everyone’s head is at, what they are working on, how they work, and all that good stuff. It is an intimate event of around 70 people from all over the globe, which is great for making personal connections. Big shout-out to Hester and Johnny for organizing everything.
I got to lead a session on design systems (thanks Sasha for the pic), for which there is a ton of interest. While I brought in my experiences with the Bitcoin UI Kit, the session was about discussing everyone else’s questions and pain points. And the questions were pretty detailed as everyone was quite experienced. It also swapped over into designer & developer collaboration, tie-ins with branding and marketing, and more. Seems like there would be a lot of appreciation if someone built out an Ethereum design system for the ecosystem. Maybe they can present at next years’ event 😉.
There were also some glaring differences between bitcoin and Ethereum lands. For example, the use of a single public address per person seems to be an unquestioned norm for Ethereum, while bitcoiners care much more about financial privacy. There’s also relatively more openness to tracking user behavior and putting third parties between users and their funds. A very slippery slope 😱.
There was a lot of discussion around the complexities of multi-chain interactions, another one of those norms. The session on account abstraction was also interesting. There seems to be some overlap to miniscript, FROST, and related bitcoin tech, but it wasn’t quite deep enough for me to be able to compare in detail. Same tech, just named differently? Not quite sure.
Something I noticed overall was that there were few clear ideas of who all these things are being designed and developed for (might just be my impression, happy to be wrong). In Bitcoin Design, we often look at personal finance behaviors established in the real world and shape products around those. It makes decisions infinitely easier. I would recommend teams to be bit bolder and establish target audiences and use cases. It’s OK if you’re not totally sure. And maybe they need to change after some testing or as the market evolves. Even for general purpose tools, you can have multiple audiences that you compare your product against. Next time, I’d love for conversations to start with that (before moving into design & tech details).
The impromptu design jam session on transaction signing was fun. Lots of energy diving into design details. Also thanks to all who watched and gave feedback to the Who is bitcoin video. Sounds like the video does a good job at making bitcoin more fun and approachable.
And shout-out to Ale for reminding us that there are tons of people around the world happy to use USDT on Tron because it fills a practical need in their lives. That’s just a fact right now that we have to face.
Lots of takeaways. Great event overall, super nice atmosphere, thanks to everyone for making it so fun and interesting.
In other news, I released the latest version of Bitcoin Icons, with 11 additions and 1 fix. The release process takes 3-4 hours since it involves so many steps. But it’s live and looking good.
For Nosta, all I managed to do was add a theme for the bitcoin puppet. The final submission for the hackathon is next Monday, so I’ll have to start wrapping things up this week.
So what do you think of bitcoin puppet? In addition to the video above, check out the website and blog post, as well as the What bitcoin did video. And check out the Discord channel and let’s have some fun with memery.
