Oddbean new post about | logout
 I have no idea what I'm even looking at. I could be missing some context and may not be your target demo though. 
 No idea at all? 
 No. I can tell that I'm entering addresses in, but for what purpose? 
 Gotcha. As I mention in my post, the situation is that you are editing your profile, for example in a Nostr client. You want to be able to accept payments (maybe you're an artist and post music to Wavlake). Your bitcoin wallet (Phoenix, for example) gives you an address that you copy and paste in. Now we have ~10 different types of addresses across bitcoin and lightning, suited for different use cases. Wallets support different combinations of those, so we need some good UI patterns for telling users what is supported, and give them tips and validation so they can set things up correctly. It is about money after all, so it's important that users feel confident.

The mockup looks at  a situation where a reusable lightning address (aka BOLT12 offer or Lightning offer) is the best address type to use. A email-like address (BIP353 Human Readable Address) is OK, but will be resolved to a reusable lightning address for better security & privacy, which we inform the user about so there are no surprises.

Big picture, I don't think anyone other than hardcore techies will recognize and understand the different address types. I am exploring whether we can just call everything a "bitcoin address". So instead of the label being "Enter a lightning offer", it is "Enter a bitcoin address". And then we provide 1-2 extra pointers below to point people in the right direction.

I'm doing lots of explorations like these and tend to share bits and snippets. There's often a lot of context that is not obvious from these short social media blurbs. So I totally get that it may not make sense. Thanks for being interested and asking. 
 I also don't know what a Lightning offer is though. Like I said, I may be missing important context. 
 Just looking at this image, I have no idea what the purpose of this is. All I see is four boxes that have something to do with addresses.