Oddbean

When things go wrong you get a generic, "This cont be done now". I'm paraphrasing. Two days ago I tried to help a friend who wanted to use her Bitcoin. She wanted to push some to get Fold card. The generic message came up and the support action to correct this is convoluted. No reason why it didn't work. No way to contact support easily about this. This is especially difficult for people who are used to having a phone number to call when you need to solve problems. The whole app approach sucks not just for Fold but all the Bitcoin apps. And for that matter apps in general. For younger people it's normal but for older people it's degenerate. Communication is just fast puffs of nonsense. Fortunately here in NOSTR land the communication is getting higher quality. I think the real issue is that introducing Bitcoin to people who have invested their lives in the Fiat economy are so used to analog communication as well and are now ultimately distracted to the point where studying a subject is less rewarding than quick bits.

Here's a story: In the early 2000s I had a friend who was a very good technical computer person. We would talk and I would tell him all my crazy adventures with technology and he would humor me, roll his eyes or just belittle me for being so dumb. One time he came from Switzerland and he was in my town hanging out and he wanted to test a new game. My video card was no good for the game so he said, "I'll buy you a new one. I really want to play this game." We went to a computer store and got the card, installed it and the driver needed some software from my Windows 98 distribution. I took out my cdrom and put it in my cdrom drive. It spun it up and it exploded! Literally the disc disintegrated into thousands of pieces. My friend looked at me and said, "Now I'm starting to believe some of the things you've told me." As it turns out the new cdroms that spun up so fast created heat and cooling and degraded the media over time. I frequently installed and uninstalled Windows or Linux in my transition period. So maybe, technology doesn't work for me sometimes because I'm too focused on making it work. When I don't care, things tend to work better. Totally off subject but that's how I think sometimes.