2023 Mar 12
Thinking more these days how the goal of developing non-custodial, trust-minimizing—whatever you want to call it—solutions is not trying to get everyone to use things in an absolutely trustless way, but to make using it in a trust-minimizing way is simple and convenient enough to become the default. There are so many aspects of trust that seem unavoidable when it comes to supplying the simplicity of UX required to allow someone as technically inept as grandparents to use. Take the example of lightning state. Maintaining lightning state on your phone is not good enough because your phone may break or you may lose it. You must have some sort of backup somewhere. Many people’s only access to the internet is their mobile device, so their only option for backing up their data is in some server run by someone else. In the event that they lose their phone, they will technically be at the mercy of this provider, i.e. they are forced to trust this provider (maybe it’s backed up in multiple places, that helps but you get the idea). The provider has the ability to take advantage of them here, which is bad, but they won’t be able to lose or withhold people’s money at scale in the way that’s possible with today’s custodial solutions.
Birthgap documentary on declining birth rates. It’s a three part series and this is just the first part, but the only overarching trends the creator could really draw were that the general attitude of people in countries with longstanding declining birth rates (Japan, Germany, Italy) were that they felt it was too much of a financial burden or time commitment and they needed to work longer or establish their careers. The main trend in historical events he drew was that these countries were hit the hardest by major financial crises (1974 oil crisis), and the US and other countries have followed a similar trend as these countries since the 2008 meltdown.