IBM consultant: User experience determines the success or failure of Bitcoin

The author Martin Hagelstrom is a Bitcoin enthusiast. He is also a project executive and consultant at IBM.

In the article, Hagelstrom explores how Bitcoin can fight against the digital payment systems of technology and financial giants and gain mass adoption. While the options are diverse, the industry still needs to pay attention to one thing, he said.

focus

Everyone knows about the war between Apple, Google, Samsung, Amazon and the banks, and the weapons of choice for these companies are their respective mobile wallets.

It can be said that whoever controls the payment user experience will own the customers and control the market.

People who use Apple Pay don't really care whether the credit card they use is from Bank A or Bank B. In fact, they can change banks frictionlessly and their payment experience will not change.

As a result, the underlying financial technology has become something valuable, and wallet providers are starting to take on more responsibilities and provide functions that were previously the exclusive domain of banks.

The way forward?

Currently, Bitcoin has two choices: become another potential payment routing system for wallets to use, or compete with them and seek to control the end-to-end experience.

Don’t get me wrong, both of these strategies will generate massive growth for Bitcoin.

Bitcoin offers several advantages over other banks or payment service providers. For example, smart contracts can be built to allow money to be used only in certain places or to purchase certain products, making Bitcoin, as some call it, "programmable money."

On the other hand, giving up user experience will limit people’s likelihood of using digital wallets.

Furthermore, because centralized wallets owned by large companies are easier to regulate, they would certainly reduce some of Bitcoin’s most attractive features: borderlessness and instant payments.

Lay the groundwork

You must be thinking: why not do both? In fact, it seems that this is what we are doing now. Some people are working hard to make Bitcoin a value routing system, while others are building wallets and other services on the network.

However, if Bitcoin is to scale, it is important to grasp the direction of its architecture.

This is an open source project, but I also understand that some people will have more influence on the project than others.

Focus is the key to any project/startup, and this is also true for Bitcoin. The people who built the TCP/IP protocol did not think about WWW, VOIP, FTP, SMTP, etc.

This doesn’t mean we don’t think ahead when it comes to scalability, but it means we stay committed to working on the protocol and letting others build applications. The difference here is whether you build a platform for the next Visa competitor or do the foundational work to let others run their products on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Maintenance focus

I have yet to come to a good conclusion on what path we as a community should follow. There are many pros and cons to consider, but I do know that a lack of focus on Bitcoin will leave room for competitors to catch up.

Not everyone who uses Bitcoin does so for political reasons; the technology can bring efficiency improvements to financial transactions.

If someone else or project focused on these first, we would probably have to work twice as hard to convince users to adopt Bitcoin.