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Bitcoin Design Guide

website·Indexed 35 days ago

https://bitcoin.design/guide/

A comprehensive resource for designing Bitcoin products, featuring design principles, user research guides, and reference designs for daily spending, savings, and inheritance wallets. It covers technical mechanics such as the Lightning Network, Fedimint ecash, private key management, and silent payments, alongside case studies on projects like SeedSigner and Saving Satoshi.

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What's inside Bitcoin Design

  1. Overview of the Family Inheritance Wallet design exploration

    The Family Inheritance Wallet is a design exploration for an application focused on sustainable long-term bitcoin storage and inheritance planning. The system is designed to allow users to create flexible multi-key wallets that include loved ones in the custody setup from the start. Key features include:

    • Timelocked recovery paths for catastrophic scenarios.
    • Dedicated inheritance key sets using heirs' hardware wallets.
    • Regular key checks to ensure long-term accessibility.
    • Privacy-preserving architecture to hide balances and transaction history from cosigners/heirs.

  2. Overview of Bitcoin-backed Ecash

    Ecash is a digital payment system that uses a 'mint' to issue digital tokens in exchange for deposited funds (such as Bitcoin). It provides a highly private and efficient method for payments because the mint cannot see user balances, specific tokens, or payment details due to the use of blinded signatures. Unlike the Lightning Network, ecash does not require network-wide consensus or complex routing through multiple nodes, resulting in faster payments, higher volume capacity, and consistent speed regardless of network conditions.

  3. Overview of the Cashu ecash protocol

    Cashu is a bitcoin-backed ecash protocol designed for simplicity, speed, and flexibility. It operates on a model where users can either run their own solo mint or join existing mints operated by others. The protocol currently supports Lightning payments, with on-chain payment support planned for the future.

  4. Overview of the Silent Payments protocol

    Silent payments (BIP-0352) is a protocol that enables the use of static addresses (starting with sp1) to simplify the payment experience without compromising privacy. Instead of reusing a single on-chain address, the sender uses the receiver's static address to derive a new, unique on-chain address for each payment. This prevents address reuse and ensures the static address itself never appears on-chain.

  5. Overview of the Bitcoin Design Learning Bootcamp

    The Bitcoin Design Learning Bootcamp is a four-week self-paced curriculum focused on making Bitcoin technology intuitive through design. It combines curated reading (approx. 2-3 hours/week) with hands-on design challenges (approx. 4-5 hours/week).

    Curriculum Structure:

    • Week 1: Bitcoin Design Fundamentals
    • Week 2: User Research & Personal Finance
    • Week 3: Keys, Wallet Creation, Backup
    • Week 4: Wallet Design Patterns

    Independent learners can access design challenges by requesting access in the #education channel on the Bitcoin Design Discord.

  6. Overview of the Bitcoin Core App redesign goals

    The Bitcoin Core project is overhauling its user experience and technical architecture to modernize the reference implementation of the Bitcoin protocol. The redesign focuses on four primary objectives: enabling node operation on mobile devices, expanding wallet features to include modern best practices (e.g., multi-key wallets, output descriptors, silent payments), providing better visual tools for experts and developers, and establishing a public design blueprint for community contributions.

  7. Overview of Bitcoin Design community events

    The Bitcoin Design community organizes several types of recurring and ad-hoc events:

    • Community calls: Open conversations on current topics, held every 3 weeks on Twitter Spaces.
    • Design guide jam sessions: Discussions on the ongoing design guide, held every 2 weeks on Jitsi.
    • UX research calls: Collaboration on the UX research kit and research topics.
    • Learning bitcoin & design: A series focused on the fundamentals of bitcoin and design.
    • Project calls: Individual project-specific progress discussions.
    • Design Reviews: Community reviews of bitcoin products.

  8. Overview of the Daily Spending Wallet reference design

    The Daily Spending Wallet is a reference design for a mobile-first, self-custodial Bitcoin application optimized for sending small amounts of bitcoin quickly and easily. Key architectural and design goals include:

    • Bitcoin Only: Focused exclusively on the Bitcoin ecosystem.
    • Self-Custodial: Users manage their own private keys, ensuring full custody of funds without third-party access.
    • Lightning-First: The wallet runs its own lightning node, allowing users to transact instantly and cheaply without external hardware/software.
    • Abstracted Complexity: To ensure ease of use, the wallet abstracts channel management by integrating with a Lightning Service Provider (LSP).
    • Unified Balance: Maintains a single lightning balance for immediate spendability, utilizing submarine swaps for on-chain sending and receiving when necessary.

  9. Overview of WalletScrutiny service

    WalletScrutiny is a platform that helps Bitcoin users verify if their chosen wallet is truly open-source and secure. The project focuses on 'reproducibility'—ensuring that the code published online matches the actual wallet software used by the end user. Key offerings include:

    • Security verdicts for over 6,000 mobile and hardware products.
    • In-depth analysis documentation for each wallet.
    • A standardized security review methodology.
    • A searchable database of wallets and their security verdicts.

  10. Overview of Saving Satoshi learning experience

    Saving Satoshi is an interactive, narrative-driven role-playing game (RPG) designed as an entry point for developers to learn Bitcoin technical concepts and the ₿OSS (bitcoin open source software) ecosystem. Set in a sci-fi future (the year 2139), it uses storytelling and game mechanics to lower the emotional barriers for new developers. The experience consists of ten chapters that combine narrative, simulations, and coding exercises.

  11. Overview of SeedSigner hardware and architecture

    SeedSigner is an open-source, air-gapped Bitcoin signing device designed to be stateless, meaning it never stores private keys. It acts as a tool for key generation, transaction signing, multisig coordination, seed backup, and address verification. The device follows a mental model of 'Keys > Signing Device > Software Coordinator', where the device is used to operate on keys and is powered off immediately after the task is complete.

    Hardware Specifications:

    • Base: Raspberry Pi Zero
    • Display: 1.3” 240x240 LCD
    • Input: 5-way joystick and three hardware buttons
    • Other: Camera module for QR code communication

  12. Overview of the Fedimint protocol

    Fedimint is a bitcoin-backed ecash protocol that decentralizes trust across a federation of guardians. This architecture ensures that no single entity has complete control over user funds. Within a federation, ecash transfers are instant, free, and private.