There was recently an episode of the Zero Knowledge Podcast with privacy activist Harry Halpin who discussed a lot of issues the folks at the frontier of privacy technology were running into. Scientists working on privacy tools like PGP, mixnets, and Tor weren’t optimizing for User Experience, and accordingly, many of the communities that would have benefited most from these tools—activists under repressive regimes, for instance—used obviously inferior tools for organizing, because of the technological sophistication barrier to entry. With cryptocurrencies, however, there’s been similarly great incentive to suffer poor UX for the sake of potential gain; as opposed to activists in repressive regimes, who were not exploring technology for the sake of gain, but often using sub-optimal non-private coordination solutions on semi-public platforms like facebook.
These might be useful case examples in particular for reinforcing your second point about UI: improving coordination.
There was recently an episode of the Zero Knowledge Podcast with privacy activist Harry Halpin who discussed a lot of issues the folks at the frontier of privacy technology were running into. Scientists working on privacy tools like PGP, mixnets, and Tor weren’t optimizing for User Experience, and accordingly, many of the communities that would have benefited most from these tools—activists under repressive regimes, for instance—used obviously inferior tools for organizing, because of the technological sophistication barrier to entry. With cryptocurrencies, however, there’s been similarly great incentive to suffer poor UX for the sake of potential gain; as opposed to activists in repressive regimes, who were not exploring technology for the sake of gain, but often using sub-optimal non-private coordination solutions on semi-public platforms like facebook.
These might be useful case examples in particular for reinforcing your second point about UI: improving coordination.
Looking forward to the next post!