Well... That Escalated Quickly - Two Years Later

Two years ago, I tried to onboard my friends to Lightning.

It failed.

Not because they were against Bitcoin, but because everything around it felt too complicated. Wallets, channels, invoices, LNURLs, NWC and plenty of words that make sense once you are deep inside Bitcoin and amybe have already a bunch of Wallets, but mean absolutely nothing when you just want to send someone a few sats.

A year later, I wrote about what happened next.  first article.

By then, Pratik and I had already started building BuhoGO.

The idea was small: connect an existing Lightning wallet through @Nostr Wallet Connect , put a simple interface in front of it and make paying with Bitcoin feel less technical.

The wallet grew. The idea stayed.#

BuhoGO can still connect to an existing wallet through NWC.

But today, someone completely new to Bitcoin can also install the app and create a wallet directly on their phone in 5 seconds.

No account with us. No email. No registration.

Spark became our easiest entry point, while NWC, @LNbits and Arkade give people different ways to use the same app depending on what they already have or what they want to try.

On-chain Bitcoin arrived. Lightning addresses arrived. Multi wallets arrived. Contacts, payment verification by @Branta , Bitcoin Map, Kiosk Mode, Auto Transfer and quite a few other things followed.

That was never the original plan. But the principle behind it stayed the same:

The complexity belongs underneath the interface, not in front of the user.

A person should not have to care which protocol is moving the sats unless they actually want to know.

They should be able to open the app, see their money and use it.\

People start likeing it#

This week gave me a nice reminder of why we started all of this.

@axelhamburch published a very approachable BuhoGO beginner tutorial.

At almost the same time, @Markus published a personal review articel: BuhoGO guide for Einundzwanzig News.

That was a pretty cool moment.

Two years ago, I was struggling to get my friends to use Bitcoin as Medium of exchange.

One year ago, I wrote about how that frustration had turned into BuhoGO.

And today, other people are writing guides that help newcomers use the thing we built.

That feels like a pretty satisfying circle.

The difficult part is (not) adding more without slowly rebuilding the same wall of complexity that made us start BuhoGO in the first place.

And that is probably the challenge for the next year.

BuhoGO does much more now. That means reliability, good backups, fast balances and boringly predictable payments matter more than another impressive checkbox.

A wallet has to work when somebody actually needs it.

Still the same roots#

One thing that never changes is that BuhoGO should not become its own little island.

Bring an NWC wallet. Connect your LNbits server. Create a Spark wallet. Try Arkade. Take your keys somewhere else. Self-host the app if you want.

We don't want people to stay because leaving is difficult.

We want them to stay because they like using it.

So, how do we get casual people actually to use Bitcoin without first turning them into Bitcoin experts?

That question is still here.

Maybe the mistake was thinking people needed to understand Bitcoin before they could comfortably use it.

Most technologies became normal the other way around. We used them first. Understanding came later, if it came at all.

That is probably the real job now:

Make Bitcoin feel normal.