Bay Area Bitcoiners

The future of money is inextricably tied to the future of payments.

So will the future of payments be bitcoin? Or will it be stablecoins?

Two divergent futures present themselves.

How do each improve upon fiat payment rails? What are their relative trust assumptions? Fee considerations? User experience implications?

In this evening session, we will hear both sides of the story from industry experts. And then we’ll break up into small groups to weigh up both visions for the path ahead to see if and how design thinking can help us identify weaknesses, make improvements and ultimately decide which version of the future we should want to help bring to life.

Vibe coding has changed everything. Including Design.

Suddenly it’s now possible for anyone to build anything using nothing more than natural language.

And now that includes building with bitcoin—future money that is permissionless, borderless and programmable.

In this practical session aimed at designer-builders who want to use bitcoin to explore what is now possible, Mat Balez will cover his favorite vibe coding tools and the most accessible ways to integrate bitcoin. We’ll then have some hands-on time together and see how many prototypes we can ship together in 90 minutes.

It’ll be an evening of experimentation and shipping fun.

Designing in Bitcoin is notoriously hard.

Decentralization. Self-sovereignty. Resilience. Adversarial thinking. Trust minimization.

These features, deeply embedded into bitcoin’s technical architecture as well as its ethos, form the central design constraints we work within. Can we design products and experiences that bring bitcoin to billions of users: while staying true to these values? while delivering on the promise of what this future money can be? while remaining as simple as possible?

This full-day Deep Dive invites Silicon Valley designers to spend a day with Bitcoin designers to examine these questions through the lens of the Grand Challenges of Bitcoin Design—a handful of the most impactful and deceptively tricky design problems in bitcoin like: bitcoin’s branding, on-ramps and off-ramps, self-custody, identity & addressing schemes, units and quantities and privacy. We’ll study these problems together and work in small groups to bring design solutions to light.

There will also be an opportunity to hear from the bitcoin startups working out of Presidio Bitcoin that are pushing the frontier of bitcoin product development forward.

Join us for a day of collaborative problem solving.