My talk for FOSS Backstage about the Open Design Guide (http://opendesign.guide) was accepted. There are several other talks about the role of design(ers) in the line-up. Looking forward to it.

FOSS Backstage 2025

Sessions

The Saving Satoshi case study in the @Bitcoin Design Guide is live. It provides lots of background about this unique and ambitious project. I'm super thankful to and proud of everyone who chipped in (you're all ₿OSSes).

Bitcoin Design

Saving Satoshi

Discover how Saving Satoshi, an interactive RPG set in 2139, makes learning Bitcoin development engaging through storytelling and hands-on challeng...

Make sure to give it a try and let us know how it can be improved.

Saving Satoshi

Saving Satoshi

Explore the mysteries of Satoshi and learn about bitcoin along the way.

Design should capture and express the essential properties of a product/technology. If users can't tell the difference between self-custodial and custodial bitcoin apps, then we're doing it wrong. Especially open-source community-led projects are well-positioned to provide unique user experiences that companies and custodial solutions cannot offer due to their different goals, structure and incentives.

What time is it? It's PR review time.

Not sure what everyone is so excited about. My chart still shows that 1 bitcoin = 1 bitcoin.

Here's a visual for a planned transaction visualizer in the Bitcoin Core App (Sparrow-inspired). Does that look useful to you? You can also try the work-in-progress web prototype:

Bitcoin Core App Prototype

For quick iteration and testing of designs.

Starter Packs are a pretty cool Bluesky feature (yes, it's basically a glorified list but framing matters). Is there a Nostr version?

Starter Packs

Discover and grow your community through Starter Packs from Bluesky.

Starter Packs are collections of Bluesky Starter Packs and Profiles that you can follow to grow your community. And, you can use Starter Packs to m...

Great to see the Prototype Fund continue do its thing. They will focus on data security and software components now. https://prototypefund.de/en/the-prototype-fund-is-going-strong/

Very interesting presentation about open-source at the United Nations. Cool to see entities like the Sovereign Tech Fund pushing things forward.

UN Web TV

(Day 2, Part 1) OSPOs for Good 2024

The second edition of the OSPOs for Good symposium is set to be a multi-day conference held on 9th and 10th July 2024, with a richer global presenc...

We saved Satoshi! Thank you to all the wonderful bitcoiners who joined our Saving Satoshi workshop at TABConf today.

Sometimes the problems with adults is that they have the ability to plausibly-enough rationalize anything and everything, and trick themselves into believing weird stuff as some deep and newly-discovered truth. Good to be humble with opinions.

Got lots of these stickers, which are all meant 100% literal, delivered for TABConf. Say hi if you attend next week.

Matthew launched a new BDK example wallet, in Swift. Really nice.

Introducing BDK Swift Example Wallet

Design Decisions

Is this a good way to have users enter lightning offers? For example, in a Nostr client when editing your profile. Trying to use technical terms to the least amount possible. I threw identicons in there just for fun. Would be nice to have visual hashes for a quick gut check, but that would obviously relay on broadly standardized implementation.

Cool initiative to get open-source maintainers paid.

Open Source Pledge

Open Source Pledge

Open Source software powers the world, but who supports the maintainers? We do.

Some explorations around picking addresses in lightning wallets.

To request bitcoin, you can share a - (Legacy/Script/SegWit/Taproot) address - Reusable payment code - Silent payments address - Lightning invoice - Lightning offer - Lightning address - Human-readable address As text, BIP21 URI or QR Code. Or ask for a Fedimint/Cashu token. Probs overlooking some other options (including bad ones like sharing xpubs) and details, but either way this is a lot to wrangle in UX and for users to have a general framework for. Let's see what solutions we converge on.

A byproduct of @Saving Satoshi is this bitcoin script editor. The team built it for chapter 9, where you learn how to construct different spending mechanisms, and now it's available as a separate tool. It's brand new, we'd love to hear your thoughts.

Saving Satoshi Script

Saving Satoshi script editor

Good UX finds that sweet spot between the "grain" of the tech and the complex needs and behaviors of people.

This is a great episode to listen to for learning about the dynamics of how work sometimes gets done in open-source. Very relevant for designers and other contributors as well.