Wouldn't it be so much better if you could sign up for a Hive account without touching any keys?

Web 3 with a Web 2 Sign Up Model

It's plain to see that our Hive onboarding process, which tries to replicate the web 2 model of the "sign up page" is absolutely not working.

With fear of Twitter breaking down, a social network called #hive is trending on Twitter. But it's not our Hive, it's a Twitter clone from 2018 that was barely noticeable for years. Today it's taking off and it has already taken over the #hive hashtag that is usually dominated by our users.

Meanwhile, we're not even getting a bump in new user registrations. We're not even getting accidental sign ups when people are looking for Hive Social.

Hive account@lordbutterfly has posted about this before when he did a marketing campaign - our model of "account creation services" leads to almost everyone not making it through to the point of making an account, even when they are highly interested.

This is just too confusing and weird, and that's just the first step of a long process.

Vouchers As An Alternative

Everyone is familiar with vouchers. We use them at the grocery store for discounts, you can use them to buy and download a game on Steam.

With vouchers we can turn onboarding into a very simple and familiar process.

1. Download and install Hive Keychain (as an example, or any supporting app) from app store
2. Scan voucher QR code
3. Choose Username
4. Account created - you are ready to go in the same app - no need to import keys

How would this be done technically?

A voucher is simply a private key, perhaps with some metadata, embedded in a QR code or text string.

Vouchers are created by a new Hive transaction - createaccountvoucher (or similar). The transaction publishes a public key, which corresponds to the private key on the voucher. Using this transaction will consume an account creation token and an appropriate amount of RC's.

There would also need to be a new createaccountfromvoucher transaction, which would need to be possible to create without having an account already, signed by the private key that corresponds to the public key in the createaccountvoucher transaction.

Vouchers can be shared by any medium, as QR codes on images, printed on paper, or shared over Whatsapp etc. etc. There is no need for anything fancy, as they are not so valuable that you will generally worry about them being intercepted and stolen.

The sign up pages eventually can adopt this model too, instead of each having their own process to help a user create and manage their keys etc, they will just send the user a voucher QR code and direct them to download Keychain or another Hive app of their choosing. Apps can also have their own sign up pages, where they give out a voucher code after some verification steps (as they deem necessary, based on how many vouchers they can get access to themselves).

Benefits:

1. Sign up process becomes way simpler and more familiar
2. A gentler learning curve. Users do not need to learn about keys, how to manage them safely etc. right at the beginning. They can learn these things further on in their Hive journey, when they're ready to.
3. Not exposing users to crypto right away will prevent people from being turned off by crypto stigma, which has certainly become a thing in wider social media discourse lately.