This past year in my life as a FOSS design contributor
Bitcoin is freedom money, but there can be no freedom without privacy. In the future, there might be no safety without privacy. But it can be hard to appreciate, understand or achieve. Good design & UX is crucial for this. I am Yashraj, and privacy has been my focus since the day I started contributing to bitcoin design. Read on to hear what I've been up to.
A silent, roundabout way
I spent the past year or so, immersed in silent payments. It started as a curiosity, and became an obsession. Over a year back, the Bitcoin Design Community (join us!) organised a Learning Bitcoin and Design call on silent payments with josie. Such calls are such a great opportunity to learn, and it really stoked my curiosity towards the protocol! Thanks to the Bitcoin Design Foundation's support, I was able to spend some dedicated time really diving deep into silent payments UX. Josie was very gracious with his time and helpful with feedback, answering my questions and discussing various aspects of silent payments UX with me. He really guided me through the journey, much like Dan Gould did with payjoin almost 3 years ago now.
I decided to put together a How It Works page for silent payments on the Bitcoin Design website. Beyond an approachable explanation, I wanted to explore the UX design space within silent payments and its impact on existing on-chain UX. I put together a google doc, and iterated over it for couple months. Throughout this process, I received great feedback from Christoph, Michael as well as Josie. Notably, I also received reviews and suggestions from Rafael from Cake as well as rearden during this process, which I greatly appreciated. The Silent Payments UX page went live in late 2024, marking a significant milestone in my bitcoin design journey.
Team work makes the dream work
I started working with the Dana wallet team to implement aspects of the guidance, as we attempt to build a silent payments-only wallet. We built an over-complicated first cut, and after user testing at Oslo Freedom Forum (shoutout to Mo from Bitcoin Design Community for helping us with this!), we are distilling the experience to its essence, focussing on donations for now. There is always so much to do and learn, too much usually!
As one might anticipate, collaboration between FOSS contributors and product teams is an interesting challenge to tackle. Both have disparate working styles, which must be blended well in order to be successful. It can be quite daunting. Fortunately, I am already having quite the ride with the amazing Cake wallet team in navigating this, as we recently embarked on the journey of improving silent payments (and async payjoin! later) UX in Cake wallet, which they have been pioneers in implementing.
In the coming year or so, I look forward to working with more projects to implement silent payments or payjoin, and solve privacy UX problems for industry and sovereign individuals alike. Hit me up!
Way of the road
The past few years have been quite the ride, and in some ways I feel like I'm just getting started! The Empire has struck back, with its recent assault on the privacy improvements of the past decade. There is motivation and several interesting problems to work on...
Sometimes the road takes you back to where you've already been, but reveals new and interesting parts of town. It reunites you with friends (hey Dan). That's what happened to me with payjoin. I did a UX case study on payjoin in early 2023, but recently async payjoin (thanks to our old friend Dan & the PDK crew) has breathed new life into the concept. Liana wallet is a great example of this renewal, and want to help users refresh timelocks with payjoin. I can't wait to dive deep and map out the fascinating design space async payjoin offers to such projects as well as users!
That said, working in bitcoin as FOSS contributor can be quite the learning curve, with frustrating moments along the way. Contributors and colleagues are spread across several timezones, with little to no formal organisation around it. It can also get pretty lonely at times, trucking along by yourself. That's why bitcoin events are so great, you get to meet your kind of people, learn from them, form some bonds and who knows, even make a few friends. So, dear reader, hope to see you on the road soon. Cheers!