You can believe that all you want, but most of the world population:
- Does not have high English literacy
- Does not have access to quality financial education
- Does not have a deep knowledge of defi systems.
If you want to build something that appeals to a global audience instead of a tiny niche, the product needs to protect users from making basic errors. If they don’t want those protections, they can always step around them by accessing smart contracts directly which is the beauty of blockchain.
These are early days, and the feint of heart shouldn't be using DeFi. But eventually, yes the UX should be accounting for the irreversible nature of crypto transactions, and project the outcome of transactions, in order to be able to provide warnings if the outcome will be disastrous like this.
The number of confirmation prompts the front-end displays should also be higher when the sums that are to be transacted are larger.
Is it still “early days”? I feel like actually using crypto is still as confusing and opaque as it’s ever been, many decades on in its development at this point. If all the effort sunk into this space hasn’t created a system/app/protocol that Average Joe is comfortable using to move money around, without the possibility that the entirety of their life savings is going to be irreparably wiped out, then will it ever?
I use Interac pretty much weekly to pay friends, rent, whatever. Every Canadian has had to stumble thru at least one Interac e-transfer before due to its ubiquity. I’ve also never heard anyone DESTROY their life as a result of an e-transfer. Seems like a fair expectation to me!
In order to do this broken slippage trade that happened with Kyberswap, Most other defi dex will 1) require turning on advanced mode 2) display a warning with confirmation box, or in some cases disallow slippage this high and 3) display a warning confirmation box if the trade moves the price more than 5%.
It is still early days in a lot of ways, but what disgusts me as a web3 developer is seeing tons of underfunded dapps get this right while vc monstrosities like Kyber don’t do the basics.
Yes, we're very early days. This is a new paradigm. Like the internet in 1982, 15 years after its inception.
Crypto should not be advertised to Average Joe for every day payments. People, when they use it, should do so with care. It has no privacy, little scalability and primitive key management.
I'll grant it is low information but that's because it is ancient wisdom that will stand the test of time. People who had FOMO but follow my advice will be glad they did in the end. The best book written about crypto is
As much as I like Matt Levine he and Bloomberg Business week scored a serious own goal and destroyed their credibility by writing a crypto-positive article two weeks before the FTX scandal.
The crypto projects you hear about in media platforms tend to be the ones with the largest marketing budgets, and the largest marketing budgets tend to be produced by scams. So your advice isn’t bad, but it also isn’t true.
