Christoph's Bitcoin & Open Design activity
By Christoph Ono
subscribers
issues
Back in action
Happy Friday 👋
Preimage
Made some progress in fleshing out a "Sign in with bitcoin" reference design (issue) for lightning applications. The video below has the summary. Ideally, this reduces the time it takes teams to build authentication (and later basic payment flows) for lightni…
Stable
Also really nice to be on the weekly calls with the Summer of Bitcoin students and hear what they are doing. It's a good group and their first steps look very promising (they are in early discovery for design improvements to Padawan).A bunch of things happene…
Steady
I have this issue open around creating a "Log in with bitcoin" reference design. The need for this became apparent during the last Shock the Web hackathon, where every team had to come up with a solution for this on their own. I found it difficult to think th…
Silencio
Also want to mention two links that stood out this week:A guide for bitcoin open-source grant seekersA Framework for Sustainable Open-Source Bitcoin DevelopmentHoping that we can get the design community through phase 3 of the framework mentioned above. Will …
Last mile solar mining UX citizenship
Almost forgot, the design challenges page went live. Very curious if we'll see some people taking them.Have a good weekend.👋
Stratospheric merchant bees
Also fun, refining the Alby browser extension icons to ensure it's clear when lightning is supported in the site, when Alby is connected, etc (issue, design).
More easter, open design & explorations
Also spent a bit of time mocking-up explorer screens for the Bitcoin Core App. The first version of the app will focus on running a node and didn't offer much functionality beyond that. Including a block explorer will make it more useful for developers, and c…
Clean-up & easter
And that's it. Happy Easter. For more, check out the latest bitcoin design newsletter.
Conferences & re-orgs
Two conversations that stuck out this week. One was about labelling. People love to discuss general terms like "wallet" and what exactly they imply. My opinion is that they don't mean much because they are abstract words representing a whole category of thing…
Open design
What an interesting week it's been.The Shock the Web hackathon wrapped up with presentations and awards on Monday. It's definitely proven that building applications on Lightning is really easy now. Still has it's complexities naturally, but you don't need to …
Activity & excitement
Somehow, many other calls also piled up this week. One with a young designer from Nigeria who wants to start contributing, another session on feedback on the design guide, a small design session and a larger project call on the JoinMarket UI, a new member mix…
A more usable guide
Which leads me to a bigger thought. The guide is quite a beast now and the content has gotten very detailed in certain areas. I assume this makes it much harder for newcomers to contribute. Several people joined the community the past week and messaged me and…
Bedtime
Same for the JoinMarket call. The group reviewed the UI and discussed user feedback and next steps. There are some really interesting UX problems to be solved related to the ambiguities around privacy.
🏔🏂
Short update for this week as school was off for the holidays, and like many people here, we went skiing with the family. Thanks to all who covered me with the newsletter, community call, etc.The JoinMarket web UI is now live as an app on Umbrel (announcement…
What's in a name?
Took quite some iteration to get there, and it leads to a bigger issue that we've encountered a few times already in bitcoin UX - the best ways to abstract technology for users (without the featured "dumbing it down" or compromising core principles). For the …
Activity, contacts & icons
Both activity and contacts are concepts that sound very basic for any wallet to support. But I really haven't seen one that actually implements them well. I hope that by putting good references designs out there, we can help move things forward.Thanks for all…
V2 & V∞
Most of this week was about launching V2 of the guide. Was fun to celebrate this a bit with everyone on the community call.
Documents & videos
Let's start with the design guide. We'll launch the V2 next Wednesday. The last issue is being wrapped up today and the crew started preparing the launch (via newsletter, Twitter thread, Medium post, Bitcoin Magazine article, and community call). This has bee…
Hands-on
The JoinMarket Web UI project is also making good progress. While I was mostly off over Christmas and New Years, the rest of the team has made fantastic progress. In a way, there have been two efforts over the last months. One the one hand, we explored new de…