Ryan Lanman

Data centers revitalize American manufacturing by driving massive demand and upgrading the power infrastructure in former industrial hubs. Building American technological infrastructure is good for America.

Tackling that UX can run up cultural challenges, too. Big issue we found trying to ‘normify’ key management at the hardware level building Bitkey was that there’s a chasm between established self-custody users and our target not-yet-onchain masses. Tradeoffs to make owning keys simpler and safer (multisig collaborative custody, recovery methods independent of seed phrases) often rankled existing maxi types, who felt that everyone should have to go through the learning curve they did. Perfect becomes an enemy of good, and the casualty becomes more people dependent on custodial setups. Maybe more of a bitcoin specific cultural problem, but one i doubt is entirely absent in EVM, either.

I really did not understand how big of an issue wallet UX is until running a crypto app. If (like me) you're a crypto OG / onchain maxi or you grew up at least using some DOS or something, you have a mental block against realizing that most people just do not know how to use a wallet--even for regular transactions, never-mind something complex like using a hardware wallet, bridging. or where you might need to switch between wallets for a single transaction flow, etc. It's deeply confusing to them in a way I don't think can really be fixed. At the same time, imo, most of the benefits of crypto are destroyed by "embedded wallets"--they are essentially custodial, and they also pose technical/UX puzzles of their own, just ones that surface later--i.e., when you have to get your money out of that specific app. Until this is solved, crypto app developers are stuck between a rock and a hard place--either preserve the fundamental self-sovereignty benefits of crypto and cap your adoption rather dramatically, or raise the question of why you are using crypto rails at all by making your app into a custodial fintech app that happens to use crypto.

@RickBacci_175 @Bitkey @max_guise @BEN0WHERE No, since it doesn’t migrate the key in the old HW (because the HW never lets it leave), it has to make a new one in the new device. Old one can be wiped clean, used by someone else, though.

@ryanlanman1 @Bitkey @max_guise @BEN0WHERE Does the original still work as a backup?

Just busted out my latest @Bitkey model, upgrade from one device to another, smooth as silk. Really nice touches in how the new screen and app work together. Beautiful work cc @max_guise @BEN0WHERE and team!

@nvk Seeds can provide unilateral exit, but does unilateral exit require exporting a seed? And isn’t the exit part what matters most?

If you care about your bitcoin future, seeds are non-negotiable. Unilateral exit, or you maybe never see your bitcoin again.

Today I was proud to advance the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. This legislation is vital to supercharging innovation and preparing our economy for the 21st century. What the GENIUS Act is doing for the stablecoin ecosystem, CLARITY promises to do for all digital assets. While today marks an important milestone, the legislative work continues.

A seed phrase on your desk isn’t a self-custody system. Bitkey Product Manager Jonathan Pollack shares why real ownership includes recovery, inheritance, and protecting every critical change on-device. That’s what Bitkey is built for.

@udiWertheimer @david_seroy Am super skeptical of the sustainability of STRC over many years, but i think Udi is right here, as things stand.

i think you made multiple assumptions in this video that are very naive and i’m not gonna address all of them i’m just gonna address the ones that matter most 1. tokenized versions of STRC are currently very small. AFAICT there’s less than $500m tokenized STRC total (through multiple different projects), out of over $8B of STRC outstanding. that’s just not a lot. the trading volume for STRC just today (during 6.5 trading hours) was over $300m. so really even if every single holder of tokenized STRC tried to sell it wouldn’t matter much. if the % of tokenized vs non-tokenized STRC grows very materially then that will require further analysis, for many reasons, but it’s nowhere near that case right now and i don’t see a reason to believe it would be 2. if retarded stablecoin borrow rates on defi jump to 20% then capital from tradfi and elsewhere can eventually come over to lower them. i understand that it happens sometimes for brief periods of time, but a sustained 20% rate on USDC is pretty much unheard of. if that happens for a sustained period of time that’s a failure of defi, not of STRC. and thankfully, thanks to (1), it’s gonna be contained. but really in all likelihood if USDC borrow rates jump to 20%, they’re just going to be arb’ed down by institutional capital. this isn’t a very serious scenario

🚨Calling all STRC & SATA Experts🚨 There is a low probability, high risk event with STRC and similar instruments I can't get seem to solve. Can any STRC experts assuage my concerns here?

That’s fair - Bitkey could do that, as a fallback’s fallback. Reasonable people can disagree whether tradeoffs worth it - 1.) would need to expose wallet descriptors, which they just found a way to blind their server to 2.) would need to weaken the hardware security in allowing it to export it’s key. But maybe thats less risky now with a screen?

@ryanlanman1 @robin_linus Can put behind a scary warning where they have to check boxes that they both tried sending a transaction and couldn’t get the apk at the usual location. If apk gets taken down I struggle to imagine hunting for the correct apk amid a sea of copycats is safer than showing seeds.

«And rather than admit we as an industry have handed them the hardest part of the problem, we call it “personal responsibility”—as if it were a moral virtue, not a design failure. » Excellent breakdown of why seed phrases are an anti-pattern.

@the_ecash @robin_linus @Bitkey Now’s a good chance to educate readers, it would seem. Related - if there’s a gap between what a concept ‘means’ and how people use it…you can probably guess which one wins out in the end?

@ryanlanman1 @robin_linus @Bitkey You're the one who doesn't know what a "wallet" means.

@the_ecash @robin_linus @Bitkey How so? You know you can’t safely backup a multisig wallet with just seed phrases, yea?

@ryanlanman1 @robin_linus @Bitkey Multisig is orthogonal to seed phrases.

@BTC_Onboard @robin_linus And pdf of the exit kit gets dropped into everyone’s cloud by default during setup, auto updated with key changes. APK is publicly available, don’t need the setup in advance of a problem - though admittedly finding a copy you trust if Bitkey *suddenly* became evil could be dicey.

@ryanlanman1 @robin_linus I’m guessing the number of people who have both installed the emergency APK on a separate device and have a local backup of the encrypted pdf rounds to zero %. Listen overall I think Bitkey is a great option, but no seed export even behind a scary warning is bizarre.

@BTC_Onboard @robin_linus It wouldn’t be as simple as a single seed phrase, though - multisig wallets need not just multiple seed phrases, but also the wallet descriptor, which doesn’t backup cleanly into a handful of english words. It’s an extra ugly/dangerous experience, not just team being obstinate.

@the_ecash @robin_linus Multisig 2-of-3, where individual keys can afford to avoid creating/storing/protecting a seed phrase, because they have redundant protections, like the @Bitkey design. I wouldn’t claim it’s better for *everyone*, but imho it is for many.

@robin_linus What do you think is a better idea than seed phrases?

@bitcoin_eagle @robin_linus You can unilatterally exit all your BTC from a Bitkey without ongoing vendor support. Agreed vendor lock in is bad, but seems like Bitkey’s seedless design includes a (hacky) workaround for that risk?

@robin_linus Vendor lock in is not a solution. Seed phrase ≠ singlesig with direct access to funds Seed phrase will always be good primitive in a custody system

@BTC_Onboard @robin_linus Is it essential to get private keys exported specifically, or is it enough to be able to guarantee an exit BTC tx without ongoing vendor support? I wouldn’t wanna keep keys generated by the hardware of a vendor i didn’t trust anymore.

@robin_linus You should at least be able to get seed phrases and descriptor out after a scary advanced users only warning. I think reasonable people can debate the default UX tradeoffs, but users must be able to get them with informed consent or it becomes lock in.

Harvard, apparently, is about to adopt a new policy to combat grade inflation. I devised my own anti–grade inflation policy 25 years ago. I’ve shared it with provosts and deans, to no avail. Here it is: The Muñoz Plan Against Grade Inflation The plan has three key components:

@starkandlime @robin_linus Dare i throw a @Bitkey into contention here?

@robin_linus Necessary in some spots for them, but wonder if they could have a side-car app.

Which Bitcoin wallet do you think has the best UX?

Most people have never managed anyone. Those who have, most have never managed anyone smarter than themselves. This is about to change for everyone. You will be surrounded by agents that are smarter than you, working for you 24/7. In a world of cognitive abundance, your understanding becomes the bottleneck. You can genuinely delegate a lot of cognitive work now. This is not sci-fi. It's already permanently changed the texture of knowledge work. But the less you understand what your agents are doing and how they're doing it, the less you will be able to get out of them. This is why it's still important to understand things like software, coding, economics, math, statistics, game theory. Not because you need to DO them (you don't), but you need to understand what's easy and what's impossible. Try to be as smart as your agents. You will inevitably fail, but you don't need to get all the way there. You just need to become smart enough to manage things smarter than you.