Thread by @BMBernstein

1/ Satoshi turned money into pure information. He transformed a hierarchical "client-server" based money into a flat p2p money. It is not a company. It is a client that allows you to trustlessly join a global economy

Understanding this is eye opening—but no new users do anymore

2/ We dramatically need to improve the new crypto user “onboarding flow”. Two big problems

- Majority of new entrants first experience is with coinbase and shitcoin trading.

- High % of “cranks” do to complexity of the space and potential $$ to be made

3/ The goal of onboarding should be to impress upon new users how different BTC and cryptocurrencies are than our current financial institutions *and the reasons why*. But instead, the opposite is happening

4/ Every form of money today needs a central entity behind it. And because people’s first crypto experience is w. CB and Polo, they assume that Bitcoin does too. But *coinbase is not bitcoin*.

This may seem petty, but many new users think they’re inextricably linked

5/ Cranks exploit the lack of education with populist like claims, leading you to believe that faster and more features is always better, and babies are dying without them

New users are attracted to these figure-heads because they resemble existing hierarchical trust models

6/ New entrants are drawn to institutions that resemble what they're used to. But the whole point of cryptocurrencies is that we’re building a monetary system that is *nothing* like our current one

If users are attracted only to what’s similar this goal will be perverted

7/ We can’t expect entrants to just get this. Especially when the incentives now are to invest in what's similar to our current system today b/c that's making the most $$. Look at recent TRON returns vs BTC for example

Investor education is the only way to fight this

8/ One of my bigger fears is that new investors are deceived into backing something that superficially looks better today, but has a *much lower* chance of surviving over the long run

People are innately attracted to spinning rims and trunk tanning beds—not pragmatically scaling

9/ To counter this we need 100x better onboarding:

Ideally playing with a full node needs to be an instrumental part of the process. Running a full node and permissionlessly sending and receiving payments from the shell is an absolutely transformative experience.

10/ There are a number of other critical pieces users need to understand:

- Why running a full node matters
- Why decentralization matters
- What is censorship resistance
- Scalability trilemma
- Governance / What bitcoin core is)
- Cypherpunk and bitcoin history

11/ There are a lot of great resources in the space from @aantonop, @lopp, @NakamotoInst, etc

But I think we need a definitive source that’s welcoming, easy to digest for non technical users, and relatively concise.Would love to help with this if anybody is thinking about it too