Wallet features innovation. Wallets have made enormous progress over the last two years, and we're going to see a lot of diversity here. Wallets are the fundamental nexus of innovation because they are the user interface, the mechanism by which a person interacts with the system. Their design characteristics, their ease of use, they are the basis by which we will succeed or fail to understand, use, expand this technology.
Wallet innovation is slow, but I remember when there was only one wallet (QT) and you had to run a full node to even have a wallet. I remember the first SPV and mobile wallets. Ease of use. Ease of backup, recoverability. Mnemonic devices for cross-border transfer to avoid confiscation. Segregated Witness / SegWit, lightweight transactions. Payment channels like the Lightning Network. Reusable payment codes and stealth addresses. Wallets dedicated to specific niche communities and languages. Wallets that support people with disabilities. Retail applications. Very strong privacy.
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second question is uh before you had a very nice analogy between gpg and SSL and why the one is used by many people and what one not and there is well because the browser does everything for us very easily and the browser and Bitcoin is pretty much the as I see it is the Bitcoin wallet or yes whatever wallet you use and um and I would love to see there more innovation in that space so my question for you would be uh what features do you would love to see in future wallets what should we focus on to make it more easier to use for the person and and more usable wallets are the the the fundamental Nexus of innovation because they are the fundamental user interface they are the mechanism by which a person interacts with the system um but also the same applies to API based systems where machines are interacting with the blockchain the Bitcoin blockchain or other open blockchains um wallets their user interface their design characteristics their ease of use their workflows they are the basis by which we will understand or fail to understand this technology be able to use or fail to be able to use uh be able to expand or fail to expand uh this technology and you say there's not much innovation in wallets uh I accept that it seems again it seems very slow at first as it builds momentum I remember when there was one wallet for Bitcoin uh it was called QT um and then we had lots of notes on the the network cuz you needed to run a full node just to have a wallet and now we don't have as many nodes um and apparently that's a problem I remember the first spb wallet I remember the first um uh Mobile Wallet uh written on Androids by Andrea shilak uh who I met recently in Berlin it's amazing person um and that's the first mobile wallet I used and then there were two and from two we went to 20 and then from 20 we went to 200 100 and soon we'll have 20,000 wallets and most of them will be crap but in the process we now have five or six really really really good wallets uh wallets that offer us ease of use ease of backup uh extensibility recoverability resilience um security uh okay I'm going to do this I don't normally do this in public but I would like to say there are a bunch of people in this room who invented bip39 phrases that completely revolutionized how easy wallets are to use so round of applause for that team I go around the world and I tell people your entire Bitcoin wallet can be uh sprayed as graffiti on a wall in the form of 12 English words and you can share that with the world how the hell do you stop that you can transmit your entire wallet by writing it on a piece of paper and recovering it memorizing 12 words and walking across a tightly controlled border where currencies are confiscated and arrive unscathed in the other side uh you can recover all of your transactions and all of your money wallets have made enormous progress in the last two years and I think we're missing the fact that they're getting even better um several new features that are going to revolutionize wallet uh segregated witness with its ability to add uh commitment signatures to input values make wallets a lot easier to do especially offline wallets um uh the ability to do lightweight transactions with segregated witness payment channels and lightning network will be mindblowing in its applications for wallets and it's going to take at least 3 years until you see those applications but then they will accelerate um and I hope to see a whole slew of wallets that are dedicated to specific communities wallets that support people with disabilities wallets that support people with all kinds of different languages and number systems and uh cultural practices Etc um and that's one of the things we have to realize which is we're going to get a lot of diversity here this is not going to be um you know one or two wallets that everybody uses I mean that would be a disaster instead what I hope to see is a Pareto distribution a parallel of wallets you have you know five or six wallets that have 60% of the user population and then you have 10,000 wallets each for a tiny tiny Niche that serve many different purposes um this is a brand new field it's growing very very fast the momentum is picking up all of this is open source uh the various wallets um use each other to discover new ways of doing things um reusable payment codes is another fantastic Innovation that gives you stealth addresses combined with hierarchical deterministic wallets uh that's been implemented in one of the wallets I was looking at recently which is called Samurai wallet that's focused on privacy and the other really interesting feature is that you see wallets that are focused on solving specific needs some are about as I said ease of use some are about convenience some about retail applications and some are about very very very strong privacy so I'm very optimistic about wallets