 Hi, I'm Ashley. I'm a user experience designer, and I just heard about cryptocurrencies today. Wow. So I was just trying to decide whether this is worth looking into. And it seems like there is a real question of ethics going on. And I know you kind of spoke to the media and stuff. But I was in a very real job interview today with a for-profit company. And I just want to know what the role of user interface designers and user prosthetizers and stuff is for this kind of platform. Where is their room to be? I don't know. See, I told you it was a bad question. No, it's not at all actually. What I'm trying to figure out is what's important about it and where to find a spot inside it. I did a presentation which you can Google at the Ideolab in San Francisco. It was actually the Ideolab as the company from San Francisco. I did this at Harvard University as part of a workshop between Ideolab and Harvard. And they were doing a workshop on design fundamentals and a hackathon. And they had all these young designers to come and do design for Bitcoin. And I did a presentation which basically was an hour of me telling them everything that sucks about Bitcoin design. And the really interesting thing about Bitcoin is that if you look at it simply as a computer technology or missing the point, Bitcoin is probably the fifth change in a technology that is the most ancient technology we have as a human species. And that's the technology of money. So it's like barter, precious metals, fiat pieces of paper, credit cards, Bitcoin. So one of the elements of design is taking something that is new and creating metaphors, visual metaphors, linguistic metaphors, ways to make something that is completely new and different, accessible to people who have an existing paradigm in their head, and helping them understand it through metaphors by setting up expectations of behavior. So if we call it Bitcoin, what does that mean? What do you expect it to behave like? If you say this is a wallet, what do you expect it to behave like? So for a user interface designer, nothing is better than taking a really, really strange, disruptive technology that affects the most important technology we use in society, money, and changes it in a way that it hasn't changed more than five times in more than two million years. And taking that technology and trying to explain it to people through design. And the good news is, the attempts we've made to explain it through design are laughably bad. So let's take Bitcoin, the name, right? What do you call the most abstract form of money ever created? Well, let's call it a coin, which is the most physical money ever created. Well, that's not a good idea. How about we put the prefix bit in front, which in some languages means small, because that's what you want to associate with money, and in other languages means I'm a geek. That should alienate anybody over 40. Now let's take the main user interface that everyone will interact with. It's a collection of keys. Let's not call it a key chain, let's call it a wallet. Because the one thing you can do with a key chain is make a copy of it. If you have a key to your house, and you make a copy of the key to your house, another person can get into your house. That makes far too much sense. Let's call it a wallet. Let's call it the thing you have in a pocket that you can't make a copy of that actually holds all your money. Even though a Bitcoin wallet doesn't hold any of your money, and you can make a copy of it because all the coins are actually in the network. And it goes on and on and on and on. Bitcoin is a space plagued by design decisions made by engineers. I mean, what greater challenge could there be for a designer to come in and fix all this mess? As far as work is concerned, the interesting thing is that this space has been generating thousands of jobs. Well-paying jobs, there are over $2 billion of investment that have flowed into this space just over the last two years. In a time when outside of this space, the vast majority of jobs are a minimum wage unqualified, and in this space, the jobs are creative and sophisticated and highly paid. I mean, I know you said you had an interview for a real job that pays real money, and I understand that. This has been my real job, and I have been earning fake money, internet money, Bitcoin money, for just over three years now. And I live happily with an income paid in Bitcoin. In fact, interestingly enough, this seven-city tour involves six talks which are organized by Bitcoin meet-ups that are helping me support my expenses, and one conference that is organized by Swiss banks. Who do you think paid me faster? I sent the Swiss banks the invoice, then they asked me for the Swift code, but my bank was closed, so I had to wait until the next day. Then I called my bank, they gave me the Swift code, I sent them four pages of instruction, they made the payment, nothing happened for two weeks, then I followed up with my bank, and they told me that they can't find the payment, so they asked me to follow up with their bank, but my bank was open, but their bank was closed, so then they followed up with their bank the next day, and they couldn't find the payment, so they asked me to follow up with my bank, but my bank was closed, so the next day, I called my bank again to ask whether wire transfer is, and you say, no, you see what happened is, this is a US dollar account, and they sent Swiss francs. So you converted them, no, no, we can't convert them, if the wire is in Swiss francs, and the destination account is US dollars, it can't go in. Well, can you give me the details of the wire? No, we can't give you information about the wire, unless you are the verified recipient, so tell me, which company sent you the wire? I said, well, I receive a dozen wires every month, all of my work is international, I don't know, maybe this was the German wire, no, no, it wasn't the German wire, was it the Swiss wire, no, no, it wasn't the Swiss wire, was it the English wire? Oh, you're getting warm. It's like, this is some kind of bizarre, sadistic 20 questions game with my banker, in order to receive my money. Long story short, the wire didn't come through, it was bounced back. Bounced back means they didn't get it either. So I called them back and I say, the wire was rejected, they said, well, we didn't get it, I said, well, call your bank, because our bank is closed today, so they called the bank the next day, and then they found out that the bank wire has been lost. Of course, these are the kinds of things that happen when you try to do banking with Botswana. Oh, wait, no, it was Switzerland, it was Switzerland, it's the center of banking of the world, and they can't do a wire transfer. So they're still looking for the wire, it's been more than seven weeks, they haven't received the money back. I told them about a very important American expression, which is NMP, not my problem, and said, you have to pay me anyway. Like, you lost your money, sorry, you use the banking system, I use Bitcoin, that's why I told you to pay me in Bitcoin, so then they sent me another wire, which took only four days to arrive. And this happens to me with half my payment, so now my contract says, if you want to pay me in Bitcoin, this is the price, if you want to pay me in anything else, it's plus 20%, because that's the fee, and I know I'm not answering your question anymore, but I'll get back to it, that's the fee that is required for me to have to talk to a banker for an hour a week. Contrast this to this experience. On Saturday afternoon I sit down, I'm like, okay, six Bitcoin meet-ups have agreed to help me with expenses, I've showed out the cost with all of them, I'm going to send out six invoices to six Bitcoin meet-ups in six different countries, which use three different currencies, and I send out the emails, and I go make a sandwich, and I come back 15 minutes later, and it says, paid, paid, paid, paid, paid, paid. And the thing is, it was Saturday afternoon in the United States, and it was Saturday night in Europe, and I had just been paid Saturday night from six different countries and six different companies in 15 minutes, and 10 minutes later, that money was in my account irreversibly. So, to go back to your question, one of the advantages of working in this space is that when you get paid, you get paid, and you get paid no matter where you're working in the world, and there's no such thing as we sent you the wrong allowance, we can take it back out of your account, that can't happen anymore, and as a professional you can bill and work anywhere in the world and work with companies that work in any other currency and use Bitcoin as the international money of the internet. So, I know that's probably not very appealing to you right now, but there are opportunities for designers. The work is very high quality, and we desperately need good designers, and you won't be able to pay any of your bills in Bitcoin at first, so when you receive the Bitcoin, you're going to have to convert it to euros, but that's very easy to do. And... right, and how many people here convert it? These guys in the corner actually offer service where they pay your bills, and you pay them in Bitcoin. So, you can pay some of your bills directly in Bitcoin, but even if you can't, all of them, even if you couldn't, one of the things I do is I convert, when I receive Bitcoin, I immediately convert some of it into dollars, and then I use that to pay the bills for the people who can't be paid in dollars. I use an exchange, a Coinbase, yes. And as the rule goes, I do not leave my money on the exchange. I move it in, I convert it, I move it out, because if it's your keys, it's your Bitcoin. And if it's not your keys, it's not your Bitcoin! That's a lesson that we all learned during Gox. Let's try not to have to be taught that lesson again.