“To build the future, you first have to imagine the future”
– Centralisation lizard
“Fix the money, fix the world…”
– anon
If implemented optimally, Ark has the potential to move us much closer toward frictionless, sovereign, hard money, that is scalable.
The challenge then becomes one of adoption: the need for highly effective and scalable methods by which to funnel new users into the bitcoin ecosystem, and utilize this newly created capacity. The launch of Arkade, with the strapline ‘Programmable Money’ went mostly unnoticed except for a very small subset of existing bitcoiners; many of whom found it to be antithetical. General adoption is driven by clear and solid value propositions.
But we need to go much further than adoption. Success means increasing number of people using bitcoin – and adjacent freedom technologies – more and more regularly in their daily lives: When bitcoin becomes a first touch preference ahead of Visa/Mastercard. And when freedom tech apps are used more frequently than Instagram / Tiktok etc.
There is no reason why a bitcoin project can’t offer the very best chat-app features, while also providing opt-in features to help protect users against fraud. New self-sovereign local-LLM’s such as QVAC and Prem can run on mobile devices and present opportunities to leap ahead of trad-fi products and propositions.
“Humans are hackable animals”
-Deputy centralisation lizard
We can leverage new paradigms. Air Miles schemes help incentivise the choice of one credit card over another for many people. Today, such incentives can be moved into real-time through gamification etc. We could instantly reward with a ‘spin the wheel’ game; or the opportunity to send an Ark voucher to a friend; or even rewarding users with mining hashpower. It goes without saying that all objectives must be maximally ethical.
This project has a large number of objectives; way too many to catalogue easily. But here are some of the headline objectives:
- Catalyse the creation and distribution of compelling value propositions that can ONLY be accessed with ‘real’ bitcoin.
- No support for wallets and projects that lag ( i.e. we only show Ark / Bolt12 invoices).
- Make Bitcoin cool again; nurture authentic cypherpunk culture from the backcountry and from the streets.
- Get devices with open source operating systems into peoples hands.
- Pioneer decentralisation in a way that helps build and support communities and individuals.
- Become a force in the ecosystem that could potentially coordinate a fork.
- Champion self-sovereignty, free speech, health and wellbeing.
- Confer ‘lifestyle brand’ properties on bitcoin:
- Raw milk
- Custom Rom devices
- Decentralised medical services
- Libre pharmacy
- Locally grown organic fruit and vegetables
- Low cost high quality burgers (delivered)
- Access to events (House flow music)
- Essential Lab equipment (i.e. FTIR spectroscopes)
- Skate and snowboard gear
- Discounted off-peak skiing, snowboarding, etc.
- Organic, quality tested New Zealand whey protein at cost price.
Amongst the many methods that could be utilised to achieve these objectives:
- Tend toward being ‘data driven’ rather than ‘opinion driven’.
- High commercial awareness, with ability to identify and convert opportunities.
- Use experimentation (A/B testing etc) to determine the most effective methods to catalyse adoption for various demographics and catchment areas.
- Use data science, nudge, gamification etc. to create incentive structures that perpetuate self-propagating (and light-touch) adoption, and dial-in the replication coefficient. (i.e. user-get-user incentives)
- Test methodologies utilised by traditional companies that are known to be effective (i.e. recursive Six Sigma DMAIC) on problems such as user acquisition, process design, project management etc.
- Up-scale successful experiments, and re-seed them into new geographies, with variable adjustments as required.
- Use scatter-gun and monte-carlo experimentation where cost effective.
UX and design should be sympathetic to the fact that most people will not take the time to understand how Bitcoin works (in the same way that they also don’t understand how SWIFT, Mastercard, or Dollar Bills work). But nonetheless, our apps can make use of helpers; wizards; documentation; advanced modes; tooltips, signposting etc… to maximise and optimsie user consciousness.
