#99 Payment info singularity
Towards the interoperability event horizon.
Happy Friday. It’s been a busy two weeks and I’ll try to keep this to a short list of things that have kept me busy.
For the foundation we’re working on a Q2 quarterly report, forming a board, advising on a bounty program, intro calls, grant announcements, and website updates. Lots of operational stuff, but we also got a new donation by the one-and-only Chaincode Labs 🙌.
Chris and I are chatting again about moving the UI Kit to Penpot. This time indirectly by starting with the Bitcoin Core App designs. Doing this on an active project with a team of designers helps ensure that the new setup is practical. I also got into the Penpot beta for the plug-in system and will try to take a look at how we can build our own workflow tools (time permitting).
Had a super interesting user interview call with someone who is an activist and has to rely on bitcoin for various financial activities due to political persecution and sanctions. Makes it very clear where some of the UX gaps are.
An initiative is kicking off by a few people to prepare an education track for bringing more designers in. It’s very early still, but I think this would be a big boon to have for the community.
Phoenix Wallet got an update that adds BOLT12 offers - reusable payment addresses. I tested their UI a bit, the receive screen specifically, and it’s getting quite messy. I also know that pretty much all wallet teams have the same design problem, so I tried to mock something up. We’re in a bit of an awkward in-between state where we don’t have good interoperability and need to let users have some options so they don’t get stuck. Over time I hope this can become simpler. It’s a really good challenge in information design.
Also spend a bit of time in Midjourney for Saving Satoshi. Midjourney improved a lot, and now the prompts I used so far create different results. That has happened before, so I need to recalibrate a bit. Good thing is that the output will be better. For example, I can pass in an image as a character reference and will get consistent rendering of people throughout the story. Very cool stuff.
We’re also now fleshing out chapter 10, which will get into lightning and is ramping up to be quite the challenge - to put together and for students.
I did another revision of the Bitcoin Core App wallet selector design and prototype. Check out the video and the design docs.
Lots more happening, but I need to prep for a call and it’s late Friday afternoon. Shout-out to all the fantastic people I get to deal with on a daily basis.
Peace & happiness & democracy.
✌️