About half-way through telling my mom about Steemit for the first time, she got that look on her face. The one that comes with a small smile, a polite nod, and an averted gaze. The one that says, "I have no idea what you're talking about and I probably never will."
The entire concept of a decentralized digital currency, existing supra-nationally, is entirely outside of what my mother could ever think possible. For her, money has always been issued by governments and held by banks. There is no way around this. Trying to explain crypto coin is like telling her water isn’t wet.
Imagine, she barely even used a computer for the first 30 years of her life. Now she was supposed to believe they could be trusted to administer finances better than humans?
She wasn't having it.
And the blockchain wasn’t helping. For instance, when I finally got her interested enough in Steemit via my own writing, she found the signup process too complex. There were too many long codes to remember. What’s a private key? Why do I need a public key? Why do I have a wallet? Even though she managed to make an account, she was immediately locked out of it because she didn’t keep track of her password.
Her fault? Yes. But my mother’s story is not atypical (just ask my stepfather).
At the heart of this issue is a staunch disconnect between values. Cryptocurrency pioneers have placed a high regard for things like openness, privacy, and usability. Whereas the most important thing for a typical computer user is simply ease of use, or “How easily can I make this thing do what you say it can do.”
For people like my mother, Dash looks like it’s about to make serious headway.
The goal of codename Evolution is “to make digital cash easy to use and access for all users, even those who aren’t technologically savvy.”
How they plan to do this can be found in the following video, where UX designer Chuck Williams talks about Evolution.
One of the most straightforward changes will be moving the private key information to the backend. No more having to remember and write down a hexadecimal private key to keep in a safety deposit box. In fact, your username will be what people send money to, and it will exist on the blockchain.
They also seem to be taking a sort of “Walled Garden” approach. Where you will be able to make purchases with Dash directly from your Dash wallet. Likewise, on the developer side of things, they plan to release DAPIs, for merchants to integrate directly onto their own platforms.
Likewise, Steemit is making a similar push, albeit from a different angle.
While Dash is focusing on the commodification of its platform and currency. Steemit, is trying to help other people commodify their content.
The new Smart Media Tokens will give bloggers, forums, and pretty much any website with a goal in mind, the ability to drive engagement and participation through the commodification of those things. Essentially, they’re giving the less technologically savvy a chance to make their own Steemit website, with all the benefits that entails. And in doing so, they (hopefully) strengthen their own market position.
Now some may say that these sorts of efforts are unnecessary, or even harmful. After all, it’s easy to steal from people when they don’t really understand the rules. And if we create straightforward UIs it’s going to encourage a lot more people to play, who might be taken advantage of.
But that’s the same argument that’s been used about GUI’s for the last 20 years. And frankly, it’s impractical. I don’t need to know how a microwave works in order to use it. I just need to know there are people in place that I can trust to tell me the do’s and don’ts.
Likewise with Dash and Steemit. I don’t need a fundamental understanding of cryptocurrency engineering to make this system work for me. At the moment, I need a bit more savvy than my mother has, but really not by much. I don’t have to use command line interfaces to open my wallet. I can send money with a control+c and a control +v. And I hope those options are always there.
As we move into this new era of ease of use, I hope these systems retain their usability. And I hope they leave the windows open so the people who are in the know, can tell me if anything's not looking all that right.
All photos courtesy of Pixabay