uLast week, I blabbered on something about fees, and I’m continuing to gather some thoughts on scaling. Another good angle is maybe…
What is scale?
Global scale? 8 billion people, or just the 5.92 billion adults (15+), or maybe the 5.3 billion internet users?
How about minimum viable scale? What’s the absolute minimum needed for bitcoin to retain its unique properties and value props? Is 5% of adults enough (296 million)?
How about thinking of use cases instead of people? Scaling store of value is totally different from cross-border settlement or micropayments. Can we maybe prioritize?
I don’t really see that discussed anywhere, and it’s certainly super tough to actually put numbers on this one. But, easier to work towards goals when they are defined.
Anyhow, Saving Satoshi chapter 6 is live. Awesome work by the dev team to make that happen. Chapter 7 dev is in the works, and Chapter 8 design as well.
The new website for the Bitcoin Design Foundation is also live. People seem to like it.
Another newsletter went out.
Spent a little bit of time designing a status indicator for snapshot generation/import (aka assumeUTXO) for the Bitcoin Core App. Really nice amount of activity in that project.
Also did a quick-and-dirty test of running Telegram chat histories of popular Bitcoin wallet groups through an AI summarizer to get a general idea if this is a good way to learn about common problems, user needs, etc. I think it is, with the caveat that everything the AI identifies needs to be manually reviewed to understand context and avoid being tricked by hallucinations. Can still save hours of manually reading through thousands of individual messages. Also, summaries are safer than asking the AI to interpret the content - that’s another potential layer of things getting skewed.
Lots of different conversations happening around the foundation and community activity. Was nice to hop on a community call again this week to chat about organizing another designathon later this year. Looking forward to that.
And that’s the way the cookie crumbles…
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