Friday, September 10th 2021 - Issue #1074

More (safe) NFC UX please

Here's something cool that Rodolfo Novak from Coinkite teased earlier today; a prototype for a new ColdCard model that would allow users to sign partially signed bitcoin transactions constructed using a mobile wallet via NFC (Near-field communication), among other things.

This would be a massive UX improvement over the process of constructing a transaction on a device, saving it on an SD card, transferring the SD card from your device to you hardware wallet, then signing on the ColdCard, taking the SD card out of the ColdCard, putting it back into an Internet/Satellite connected device, and finally broadcasting the transaction. As you can see from the demo above, the ability to communicate via NFC makes the physical movement of the SD card unnecessary (you can see a demo of that here). This is just for this one use case too. It will be cool to see where else NFC can improvement payment UX.

Even cooler, the ColdCard team has made it so you can disable the NFC functionality if you're not comfortable with the tradeoffs, which I'm not well versed on at the moment.

Implementing NFC into the bitcoin payment flow UX seems like it could be a massive improvement. I know that personally I started using an NFC-enabled debit card and it is orders of magnitude better than having to put your chip + PIN information in. I can only begin to imagine what that type of improvement would feel like compared to some current bitcoin transaction UX flows.

Also, since NFC devices are cheap and can be very small, this could open up a whole new design landscape for bitcoin wallets. However, there is a chance I'm just getting a bit overexcited. If you search "bitcoin nfc" on Twitter you can find people making NFC compatible bitcoin wallets going all the way back to 2016 (at least from my quick observation). We shall see how it all pans out!

Final thought...

That Larry swell was no joke. Pristine South Jersey conditions. Probably the best I've ever seen. Got smacked up good on my final ride too. Neck is feeling sore.

Enjoy your weekend, freaks.

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Marty's Ƀent - September 10th, 2021 - Issue #1074

More (safe) NFC UX please

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