Welcome to the 21 and 21 podcast.
Awesome. Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Yeah. For those of you that don't know Eric,
Eric Ativo is a Stockholm-based product designer and Human Rights Foundation grantee
working on Bitcoin and eCash,
he's a lead designer at Hoseki,
and contributes to open source projects that make Bitcoin more usable and private.
Yeah, exactly.
And he's joining us for Bitcoin Design Week, and it's the last day.
Yeah, we're wrapping it up today.
Today's the final session.
We're very excited for it.
Yes, me too.
It's been an event-packed week, but I think it's been going well.
It's been really well.
I was telling Christoph and Mo earlier, this is the best Bitcoin event I've been to in my life.
So I'm beyond happy with how it went.
Wow.
And I think you've been to a lot of Bitcoin events.
Yeah.
Okay.
Cool.
Well, can you maybe just tell our listeners more about it and kind of what the overall goal was?
Yeah.
Yeah. So I'm here for Bitcoin Design Week, which is a collaboration between the Bitcoin design community and Bitcoin Presidio, where we're inviting designers from the Bitcoin space, but also designers from the non-Bitcoin space that are in the Presidio San Francisco area to join us for a week of sessions, workshops, discussions, kind of ideation about what the future of money will look like from a design point of view.
and when you kind of bring in people that maybe aren't already into bitcoin design but are working
in in other industries you can get some really interesting kind of uh cross like pollination and
stuff so the idea is to explore what the future of digital money or money looks like uh with uh
people in the environment where they kind of shape the future technologically which is this place
yes i was super excited about this event well i mean one of our goals at pursue bitcoin is to help
bridge bitcoin and silicon valley and i'm curious have you gotten any feedback so far from maybe
non-bitcoiners that has been like interesting and useful yeah there was um uh one individual from a
company should i say the company yeah i think i can right yeah so from from amazon they expressed
interest in um learning more about bitcoin as a payment method uh and how they can kind of maybe
think about why it is that Amazon being such a large retailer, they're not integrating this
payment method into their business. So they kind of were approaching this from a very different
angle where they just wanted to learn more about kind of how this money works and how they could
incorporate it into their business basically. And yeah, so that's kind of, I think like a really
good archetype type of person that uh would benefit from this event to kind of see bitcoin
in action how it's currently used um and kind of feel the power of it and then hopefully a light
bulb goes off where they realize it's actually pretty easy for us to implement or use hopefully
that's what we try to make it yeah it's actually been really interesting um i mean we've had a lot
of events at presidio bitcoin over the last like nine ten months or whatever and i think that this
has been the biggest success
in getting like non-Bitcoiners here.
I mean, I've been meeting a lot of people
who are some people from University of Berkeley,
which was like really cool to see.
And then, yeah, like some people,
it was like their first Bitcoin event ever.
Yeah, no, I think that's great.
And I think like organizing this event
around designing the future of money
is a really good framing
as opposed to just screaming,
let's get in here and talk about bitcoin it's more um the future of how does digital money look like
that's i think a much more kind of open message to a lot of people it's not a bitcoin or event for
bitcoiners oh yeah that is a good point yeah we didn't even have bitcoin like in the title of the
event no so it's and there's a lot of people in san francisco who work on money in some form so
and they're designers so get over here this was a great learning lesson i love having a bunch of
designers here because mainly it's like a lot of developers so there's just one lots of cool
fashion here lots of cool like artsy conversations and then new perspectives i'm like that was really
smart um so maybe talk a little bit kind of what we did yesterday which was a bit like kind of like
hackathon based almost and uh i'd love for you to tell our listeners like maybe a little bit
more about the kind of like hackathon design challenge project that you worked on?
Yeah. So yesterday, I think, was the most fun session because it was a session where
we were really kind of jamming on ideas and we had these kind of grand design challenges. And
there were a variety of them. The one that I chose to kind of focus on was a BitChat focused
challenge. I think a lot of the listeners will know what BitChat is. The TLDR is that it's a
messaging app that was by-coded by Jack Dorsey that lets people communicate via Bluetooth. So
they can just send messages totally offline just using Bluetooth rails. And what we explored were
what are some ways that we can basically add cool features to this app. Payments were kind of one
idea. That's an idea that I've already kind of been working on with with BitChat. I've worked
separately on a integrating an eCash wallet into BitChat. But ultimately, we kind of went a different
direction with yesterday's challenge, we looked into creating kind of private or permission groups
in BitChat because by default, it's a mesh network. And that means that it communicates locally with
whoever is in your Bluetooth mesh. So 15 to 50 meters, I believe is the range. But we also want
a way to kind of make closed channels, private channels. So we looked at like, what does the kind
of UX of creating a private channel look like? And I think one of the really kind of cool things
that we settled on was this concept, this idea of inviting people with this kind of bump UX,
kind of like Apple Pay, where I create the group, I generate an invite, and then you can imagine
that an NFC kind of invite card appears. And then if I want to invite you to my private bit chat
group, I just bump your phone, and then you get invited into it. And we wanted that because this
is mesh So it local 15 to 50 meters So we should already be in the same area And now there this kind of I think really novel and really kind of personal experience of just like inviting people to your chat by like you know phone bumping almost like your fist bumping and you letting them into your space So yeah we put together a concept with a high
fidelity design. I vibe coded something that was hard coded. So not fully functional, but it ran
through the scope of creating a channel and inviting. And that was fun. And we did it all in
one hour. And we even, you know, put some logic about how the permission group should work and
whatnot. Wow. Yeah. I mean, it was really cool. It was way better than my project. So I guess like
kind of like the output that you guys did yesterday, like what's the next step? Is that
going to like, you submit it into VR? Are you going to try to get it into the real app or like,
how does that work? Yeah. So the next step for me at least is to get it fully functional and not
hard coded. So I actually met someone who has another Android. So today what I'm going to do
is I have it running locally on my computer. I'm going to try to flesh it out so that it
fully functions with the communication
protocol, the Bluetooth,
and the invite actually kind of
works and it's not just like a hard-coded thing. So
I want to actually flesh it out and have like a fully
working prototype and then test it
between two Androids. I
think we can do the NFC
invite on Android
because they're not as restrictive as Apple.
So I really just want
to see if I can get it fully functional.
And then maybe I can share
it with the larger BitChat community because it's
open source, so I'll throw it out on Twitter. I'll
throw it out anywhere like hey we came up with this during the presidio um design week here's
our idea what do you guys think very cool uh yeah we kind of have this thing at presidio bitcoin
where like people tend to come here and then they leave with lots of work we're very good at like
making people busy yeah yeah i can kind of already see how that yeah um well another thing that you
were building with bitchat was like this integration with with cashew yeah um okay i feel
like a lot of people don't understand cashew like can you like just like before we get into that
yeah yeah really just at the basic level for people even who like kind of barely understand
bitcoin well how is cashew different sure how we explain it why it's cool yeah let's do it uh
cashew in one minute i'll do my best uh so cashew in the context of bitcoin and i'll speak uh about
e um e-cash in the context of bitcoin and i'll speak about cashew specifically uh it's a mechanism
or it's a way to use Bitcoin that what eCash does is it lets you take Bitcoin that you already have
in the form of Lightning and then change that Bitcoin, give it some magical properties so that
the Bitcoin just becomes a string of text. It becomes a piece of data. And when you're able
to transform Bitcoin into just a string of text, a piece of data where the data is now the money,
you can do really, really cool things. And what does that look like? So you can imagine that I've
gone from sats I had in my lightning wallet, and I've deposited them into an eCash wallet. And from
the end user, it looks the same, you just receive a lightning payment. But now that I have this data,
I can unlock this kind of throw UX or this push UX, because the data is the money. So that means
I can take that data, I can encode it in a QR code, I can print it out and give it to someone,
I can airdrop it to someone, I can do like a bump to pay kind of push UX, where I just
throw you the data because it's just a string of text. And what I think is really special about it
is that it also works totally offline. Because all you're doing is transmitting data, you can
send that through SMS, through Bluetooth, you don't need to be online to use kind of those
payment rails. So I think it unlocks this way of using Bitcoin that is very similar to how we use
physical cash, where you just hand someone a thing, and then they receive it, you don't need
a direction. You don't need to have an instruction set on where to send it.
Like with traditional Bitcoin Lightning, you require
a Lightning address or a URL or a destination of some
sort. With eCash, you don't. And one of the
key things that I want to emphasize is that it unlocks these kind of properties
with the trade-off of custody. So eCash is a custodial solution. I want to be very
very clear about that. So you trade custody to get these kind of magical
properties of using the data as money.
That was very good.
Yeah, I feel like you have been the best person to explain eCash to me.
So thank you for that explanation.
And then so you kind of mentioned it, but like, well, maybe we're getting a little technical
here, but like the Lightning Network, which is like, I know, a layer on top of like, you
know, on-chain Bitcoin.
How does eCash, like what's the relationship between eCash and the Lightning Network?
Is the Lightning Network like critical to how eCash functions?
Yeah, it's absolutely critical because lightning is the glue that kind of holds this thing together and makes it interoperable. Because if you didn't have a way to go from eCash to lightning, you would be kind of locked into this. It wouldn't even really be Bitcoin. You'd just be using some, you know, third party coin, basically.
So Lightning is the glue.
What makes eCash, I think, special and novel is that you can go from eCash and you can just send it to anyone's Lightning wallet.
It's fully interoperable with the Lightning network.
So when somebody puts a Lightning network QR code in front of you or if you want to send it to someone's Lightning address, you can just do that from the eCash wallet.
So that's that interoperability, I think, is key.
like kind of like thinking about the future in like an ideal world and you know having good user
experiences maybe like first trade-offs with custody or maybe having a choice what do you
think like is like the kind of ideal vision of like bitcoin working with eCash in the next like
five years so i think that there's something i didn't touch on is kind of the the privacy
benefits is that eCash offers the the best in class privacy it uses very old cryptography that
I'm not going to pretend like I have a super sophisticated understanding, but it uses
Chami and Blinded signatures in order to achieve this totally perfect privacy so that when you
transact with eCash, it's technically mathematically impossible for someone to kind of see a trail
there. So that to me, when I think about the future of what eCash could look like or the
cool things that people can do about it, I think about existing custodial solutions in the space
that people already gravitate to. Things like Wallet or Satoshi, or if you have Bitcoin on
Cash App, you're using Cash App as a custodian. And what I would love to see is one, for these
custodial solutions to implement e mechanisms so that they increase the privacy of the users all across the board I think that would be a massive win for custodial Bitcoin to get this
level of privacy. And I would also like to see these wallets kind of really lean into the push
UX, this throw UX. I think of a wallet like Cash App, which is a really beautiful lightning
experience. It's really nice to send Bitcoin on Cash App. What I would love to see would be
something like at the time that you go to hit send Bitcoin, you type in whatever, you know,
$10 in Bitcoin and you hit next. If there's like an option that's like a throw cash, you tap that
and then imagine something like almost like an Apple pay, like a nicely designed cash app card
slides up with like $13 on it. And it says, you know, tap your phone with your friend to send your
cash. And then you just go like that. And then you just like receive the cash. And that would work
instantly with zero fees between two cash app users because they can be in the same cash you
mint. And what I think would be really novel about that is that it would be perfectly private.
You can imagine this kind of throw cash feature in custodial wallets where if you have like 50
people at a conference and everyone just throws the cash with this kind of bump UX to each other,
there would be no record of that transaction. And it would have this really, really great kind of
just push, throw experience. I think the big thing there is the regulatory thing, which I'm not a
lawyer. I can't speak to that. Like, is this even feasible for a custodial solution to offer this
kind of service where they don't have the ability to trace it and they lose that kind of, you know,
maybe legal requirement that they required it to do some due diligence? I don't know. I'm not a
lawyer. I'm strictly thinking about like, how can this experience feel, feel really magical? And I
Think about things like that.
This would only work with custodial wallets, though?
Custodial wallets that are part of the same Mint.
So, yeah.
Okay.
So then, like, Lightning is more of, like, a solution for non-custodial wallets?
Well, the Lightning ASIC would work for a custodial or a non-custodial wallet,
but that would be just a payment done through the Lightning network.
I see.
So it would just route through the Lightning network,
and you would just have the same kind of Lightning network experience.
This kind of push effect would work for people within the same Mint.
The same eCash.
So yeah, that's why I say like it would make sense if everyone just had Cash App and wanted
to kind of build this cash or if everyone had Wall of Satoshi and wanted to have this
experience.
Got it.
Super cool.
Quick pivot away from Bitcoin.
So you're living in Sweden and funny enough, we discovered that like you live like where
is my grandma was from Sweden, like in the same area.
Yeah.
Maybe talk a little bit about how like what's the most Swedish thing that you've picked up
um oh wow that's that's a good question i think the most swedish thing that i've picked up that
i've had to adjust um coming from being an american uh is the embracing the idea of not
not doing small talk and people in swedish society it's kind of polite and it's considered like
appropriate to not interrupt strangers uh if you don't know them uh which is very different from
American culture where if I'm in an elevator with somebody or I run into somebody wearing a shirt
with a band or whatever the case may be, that is a cue to strike up a conversation. That's not weird.
You're not bizarre for doing that. In Sweden, you shouldn't really do that. It's seen as if you
don't know that person, it's almost out of respect. You don't want to invade their privacy or their
space with a question if you don't know them. So I've had to adjust to this society that is very
kind of reserved and insular. And it's kind of changed the way that I've interacted. And I think
in some ways now when I'm here in the U.S. walking around and I have these interactions
with strangers that they're very different. Yeah, that's interesting. I guess as a designer,
what about the Swedish architecture or anything about the culture has influenced the way you think?
Yeah. So Sweden, I think it's a designer's paradise. I think that there's just a lot of
thoughtfulness into how they've designed their cities, into also how they've designed their
kind of social infrastructure. And what I mean by that is that Sweden is a very, very high tech
society. And there's actually a lot of cons to this. And you can kind of anyone interested,
they can Google about how cashless Sweden is, for example, physical cash is non-existent there.
Everything is done centralized through an application that is totally surveilled and
controlled by the state called Bank ID. But it's actually an example, to me, it highlights that if
you design an experience really well, anyone can use these digital products to authenticate and do
things. So there are people in Sweden that are in there, they're not digitally native, they might be
in their 50s or their 60s. But they all use bank ID to sign in to their bank account, to pay taxes,
to reload their MetroCard to when you pick up a package at a post office, you sign on your phone,
and then the person gives you the package, you don't need to show your physical ID,
everyone interacts with this this bank id software and it's designed so well that it appealed to
everyone there and to me that that's proof that if you design something really really well
um and it becomes sticky and integrated into society people want to use it and they enjoy
using it and i'm not going to get into kind of the privacy aspects and the trade-offs that the
people made to kind of engage with this with with this system that's kind of a separate discussion
but solely from a kind of design and user experience point of view it's kind of uh
inspirational that they've they've managed to design something that that really just kind of
permeated across society like that yeah that's that's super interesting i mean yeah with bitcoin
and it's really interesting that you say like non-digital native people can just like pick it
up and like there's you know not like challenges which is actually kind of something i've noticed
with like ai like chat gpt for example like my boyfriend's like 94 year old grandma is like using
Like she's like, she knows how to use it.
It's like easy, like definitely not like a digitally native person.
So there's definitely like a large experience of like,
or opportunity with Bitcoin to just make it super easy to use.
Where like, we don't have this like excuse anymore that it's like confusing.
Yeah. And I think with, with a lot of the, the chat apps or like the LLMs,
like there's a saying that like no interface is the best interface.
And these chat GB teams have done something really well where you're just chatting
or they have the on your phone they have the button you can hit where it almost like you just speaking to a device and it just speaks back to you and then you don interact with it other than your voice and when you pause it responds if you interrupt it it it stop talking and then you know
prioritize your response so no interface there um that's i think you know really well done
interesting okay we have a few minutes left uh you know this has been super fun we have to get
back to design week, get to the breakfast burritos before they run out. So I guess kind of like
leaning into that anymore. Are there any like dream projects that you'd want to see Bitcoiners
build that have like a really cool, seamless user experience? Yeah, I would love to see. I'm,
I'm a huge fan of Swift, which is the native programming languages that Apple uses to kind
of make these like, kind of magical experiences that you feel when you use Apple products.
one of the things that I would like to see are
Cashew apps, more Cashew
apps coded in Swift. They have
these very subtle kind of micro
animations and these haptics that
the everyday person might not
kind of realize they're there but
when you add these things
and when they're kind of in the
totality of the app, they add up to this really
just like polished and beautiful experience because
it's all these little things
the subtle shadow, the subtle micro animation
the slight haptic when you
when you like send something that make, make it feel magical. I want to see more apps kind of lean
into that. And with Apple in particular, when you're kind of in the, in the ecosystem, you can
unlock really, really cool things that you can't do on other ecosystems. There's this thing called
extensions, which some people might be familiar with this when you're on iMessage and you hit the
plus icon on the left and that kind of menu slides up and you click on photos. And then at the bottom
of your message are your photos and you can tap on them, select them, do things, and then just send
it in the message. You never had to leave your chat or your iMessage to kind of perform this
action. I want to see eCash lean into those kinds of experiences where I'm just using iMessage,
chatting with my friend, and I can hit plus, select an eCash wallet, select 12, and then just
send it through iMessage. And it's very seamless. It doesn't even feel like you're using Bitcoin.
It feels like I'm chatting with you, just throwing you money. And then it appears in the chat box and
you just tap it and it opens up your wallet and claims it automatically. That's what I want Bitcoin
to feel like. I don't want it to feel like it's this extremely novel, complex technological project
that you have to download a wallet for and then use a layer one or a layer two and all this stuff.
I want to see Bitcoin integrated into how people already use their devices. So that's the type of
stuff that makes me really excited and stuff that I want to work on. Yeah, we definitely don't want
like the user to know anything about like layer one or layer two or maybe at a basic level.
There's different kinds of users and I think it's okay for certain people.
For some people.
Yeah, that want to have Phoenix
and look at my channels
and see that they're balanced
and stuff like that.
I think that's great.
And I'm not, you know,
saying that that's the wrong approach.
But I think for a lot of people,
we often forget that
most people are not Bitcoin enthusiasts.
They actually don't care.
They just want to do things
and have them work.
And I want to design for them
because, you know,
that's where the magic is, I think.
People like me that are deeply into Bitcoin,
I have a high tolerance
for things that might not be
you know, the most elegant.
But if we really want this thing
to feel like magic internet money,
keyword there is magic.
And I think a lot of that comes
into how people experience it
for the first time.
Last question, super quick.
If you could give our listeners
just a single thought
that would maybe like inspire people
who aren't into Bitcoin already,
maybe designers or people around here,
like what would you say
to encourage them about
designing the future of money.
Yeah.
The most important thing is that anyone can contribute to Bitcoin.
And that might just sound like a truism or a cop-out, but let me explain it further.
You don't have to be a designer or developer to contribute to Bitcoin.
One of the biggest ways that you can help is literally just to use a Bitcoin app
and think about what was confusing, what was clear to you when you used it.
So much of design is not visual.
It's not about the shadow.
It's not about the radius of the box.
It's not about how you lay things out.
It's about words.
It's about copy.
So if you're someone that just likes using Bitcoin, but you're not a designer or you're
a developer, you can help tremendously by using someone's app, looking at the copy,
looking at the messaging.
How are you communicating things to the users as I'm running through things?
And then stopping and taking five, 10 minutes to take screenshots, share them with the developers
and say, hey, when I was using your wallet, I found this kind of language confusing.
Or I expected that when I opened up this menu, I would see this option here, but I found
it here instead.
And for me, that didn't make sense. You're helping design Bitcoin products when you're just doing that. So I would encourage anyone out there that wants to contribute to do that. Reach out to developers, reach out to designers and share your experience when you use it. You can help. And also, if you ever use a Bitcoin app that made you feel really good and made you feel like that was slick, like you felt like that was happy, tell them, tell the designers, tell the developers that that goes such a long way to kind of hear that from people.
that was a great way to end the show um well if someone wants to tell you about something that
you've designed that's cool where can they reach out to you what should they follow yeah um you
can find me on the worldwide web um i love the internet um i won't stay off the net uh i'm on
primal.net slash eric that's my nostril account uh eric with a k eric with a k yeah the scandinavian
way uh you go to erik.day that's my website with all my links there if you're on x or twitter uh
it's ux eric underscore um yeah just those are you know three ways to just reach out to me and just
just tag me and let's let's have a conversation i'd love to know what bitcoin apps you're using
um if you use e-cash tell me like what didn't work for you what what sucks so we can make it
better if they see you if they're in within 15 meters they can bump you yeah i'm working on it
So if you're within 15 meters, put pressure on me.
Next time you see me, pull out your Android and be like,
Eric, invite me to a private bitch hat channel right now.
That's going to fire me up to actually get that function working.
Okay, I'm going to do that later today because I don't have an Android.
So you're not.
I can't.
Okay.
Well, thanks for joining the show.
Let's go have a great final day at Studio Bitcoin Design.
Let's do it.
Let's go.
Breakfast burritos.
Yeah.
Okay.