Sovereignty without sacrifice

You can have easy payments or private payments. Good UX or self-custody. Censorship resistance or features people actually use. That’s been the conventional wisdom for years.

But it’s a false choice. The protocols are built. Bitcoin works. Lightning works. Nostr works. The hardest technical problems are solved. What remains is a different kind of challenge: making these products available and accessible to people who don’t care about self-sovereignty—yet.

Leading sales at Bitcoin infrastructure companies taught me this: normal business customers can’t see the value through a thicket of technical obfuscation. The concepts, terminology, and complexity baffle them. They want better payments. We give them liquidity management, routing, and channel rebalancing. Industry players continue to struggle with closing this gap.

Meanwhile, centralized platforms get smoother, faster, and more deeply integrated into daily life. Apple Pay works everywhere. Instagram launches new features weekly. Neobanks make sending money trivially easy.

We’re not competing with those systems from a disadvantage. Lightning is faster and cheaper. Nostr can’t be censored. Bitcoin can’t be debased. The question isn’t whether our technology is better. It’s whether people can actually use it. Two traps prevent us from getting there.

The two traps we can’t afford

The first trap is complacency. “There’s no need to rush. Eventually, people will wake up and demand self-sovereignty.” This assumes that time is on our side. It isn’t. Central Bank Digital Currencies are coming. Platform regulation is tightening. Network effects are compounding for incumbent systems. Every day centralized platforms improve their UX while we accept ‘worse but more sovereign.’ The gap widens, and the switching costs grow.

The second trap is elitism. “If they don’t get it, they don’t deserve it. We’re building for people who understand what matters.” I’ve seen this attitude kill adoption. Customers explicitly choose custodial solutions over self-custody because non-custodial options feel too risky, even dangerous—one wrong move and their money disappears. The custodial option simply worked, despite the trade-offs.

When the self-sovereign option spooks users while the centralized option feels safe, we haven’t built freedom tech. We’ve built a hobby for risk-tolerant technical elites.

The systems we’re competing against keep improving—better UX, deeper integration, more magical experiences. We can’t win by waiting for people to care more about sound money. We have to build products that are better at solving their actual problems.

Protocols built. Products needed.

The Bitcoin network has operated for over sixteen years without meaningful downtime. Lightning Network routes payments in milliseconds with fees measured in satoshis. Nostr provides censorship-resistant infrastructure for identity and communication. These are remarkable technical achievements.

The next layer is making these technologies accessible. Freedom tech must win on every dimension, not just principle.

Lightning is cheaper than Visa and faster than Venmo. The protocol delivers on its promises. However, poor UX creates delays and failures that hide these advantages. Business customers get lost in channel management; normal users can’t figure out liquidity. The technology that works brilliantly under the hood never reaches its potential because the user interfaces fail.

Consumer wallet companies are adopting Spark—which trades Lightning’s trustlessness for simpler UX—proving how badly the market wants Lightning UX solved. That demand is real. We need to meet it without fundamental compromises.

Nostr’s identity and communication infrastructure enable everything from social feeds to messaging to publishing. Primal demonstrates how consumer-grade UX can hide this protocol complexity for social media. It offers a clean interface, fast performance, and features that compete with X. Predictably, they get criticized by purists who oppose design decisions that favor UX over strict adherence to Nostr protocols.

This tension illustrates the broader problem. We need products that win on user experience first, with decentralization as the foundation rather than as cover for poor UX.

Holding your Bitcoin should be more secure and easier than trusting a bank. Currently, self-custody terrifies normal people, and rightfully so. One mistake and your money is gone forever. But products like Block’s Bitkey show this is solvable. They combine hardware wallet security with smartphone simplicity. They enable recovery without seed phrases, which most users will inevitably lose or mishandle.

We can clear these hurdles with a commitment to commercial excellence that matches our technical achievements.

UX as a competitive weapon

Distribution gets people to try a product. UX determines if they stay and tell others.

Building sovereignty without sacrifice means treating UX as the primary competitive advantage, not an afterthought. While great progress has been made at the protocol layer, the frontier has moved. Now it’s time to focus on UX and distribution.

User experience can’t be secondary. The products that win will feel as polished as PayPal while delivering Bitcoin’s resilience. That means hiring world-class designers. Conducting extensive user research. Iterating relentlessly on what actually works.

Every product decision has to drive adoption. Every feature decision should answer: does this make the product obviously better for someone who doesn’t yet care about permissionless protocols? If the answer is no, question whether it belongs in v1. Primal doesn’t violate Nostr. It makes Nostr usable.

Most freedom tech companies market exclusively to people who already understand why self-sovereignty matters. That guarantees a tiny addressable market. Winning means marketing to people who just want better payments, better social media, better financial tools—who discover the inherent benefits after they’re already using the product.

What I’ve learned from decades in sales: customers don’t care about a paradigm shift until they experience a product that works better than what they’re using now. Meet them where they are. Start with what fits their expectations and actual needs. Let them discover the benefits through use. That’s not compromising on Bitcoin’s principles. It’s sequencing the conversation correctly.

We can’t win by being better at one thing (self-sovereignty) while being worse at everything else (speed, cost, UX, features). We have to be better at everything—or at minimum, comparable on the basics while being superior on self-sovereignty.

The best protocol in the world accomplishes nothing if nobody uses it. We have to win commercially to win ideologically.

The window is closing

We won’t get there overnight. Building products that compete on every dimension takes years, not months. But we’re at an inflection point, and the trends are clear.

CBDCs aren’t theoretical. China’s digital yuan has a reported 225 million users. The ECB targets 2026 for their launch decision. Brazil and India roll out in 2025-2026. These systems have government resources, zero self-custody UX problems, and institutional backing.

That’s what we’re racing against. Bitcoin’s been live since 2009. Lightning since 2018. The protocols work. But achieving world-class UX on top of working protocols still takes years of sustained iteration. Apple Pay took 15 years of mobile payments development before launch, then another decade to reach 5.6% of retail sales. Venmo needed 7 years just to add basic merchant payments. Lightning’s seven years in—90% of transactions still require custodial solutions because self-custody UX remains too hard.

We have maybe five years before CBDCs entrench, before network effects compound, before switching costs compound dramatically. That’s the window. Every product decision matters. UX can’t be an afterthought. Commercial excellence has to match technical excellence.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Fix the money, fix the world—but only if we actually win in the marketplace. Having better technology that nobody uses doesn’t fix anything. We need products so plainly superior that adoption becomes inevitable. Some companies are already figuring this out.

What I’ve seen work

The companies making progress on this aren’t doing anything revolutionary. They’re doing the obvious things consumer product companies learned years ago—just applying them to freedom tech.

They hire for UX before their fifth engineer. World-class design isn’t a luxury when competing against PayPal and Cash App. It’s the difference between a product people tolerate and one they choose. The designers who get this right have shipped consumer products to millions of users. They know what “obviously better” looks like.

Winning companies watch real users struggle with their product. Not Bitcoin enthusiasts who’ll tolerate rough edges, but people who use PayPal and think it works fine. They sit users down, give them a task, and watch where they get confused. They don’t explain, don’t help, just watch. Then they build for how users actually work.

Activation matters more than signups. How many people who install a wallet actually fund it and make a payment? How many who create a Nostr key pair actually post something? The gap between signup and real usage is where most adoption dies. The startups that thrive identify those specific breaking points and fix them.

The companies that scale track what actually drives adoption. Which acquisition channels bring users who activate? Which communities send people who stick around? Most freedom tech startups spread effort across too many channels without knowing which ones work. Double down on what drives real usage and cut the rest.

The best companies steal shamelessly from products that work. Stripe’s onboarding. Cash App’s simplicity. Notion’s interface design. They study what makes consumer products feel effortless, then apply those patterns to freedom tech. The wheel doesn’t need reinventing.

Winning starts with one undeniable advantage. Not better for people who care about self-custody. Better for everyone. Faster, cheaper, simpler, more reliable. The companies that gain traction build everything else around that single thing their product does obviously better than centralized alternatives.

Distribution begins with a beachhead. One community where the product solves a real problem today—a subreddit, a Telegram group, a local Bitcoin meetup. Start narrow. Let organic word-of-mouth compound from there.

Viral loops matter more than viral moments. One-time publicity spikes don’t build sustainable businesses. The products that spread are designed so that using them naturally exposes others to them. Payment requests that show what wallet you’re using. Social posts that demonstrate features in action. Every satisfied user becomes a distribution channel.

Start narrow, prove value, compound growth. This approach works. None of this is novel—it hasn’t been systematically applied to freedom tech yet.

Sovereignty without sacrifice

Bitcoin payments become the default when they’re obviously better—faster settlement, lower fees, better privacy, no chargebacks, and no intermediary risk.

People use Nostr when it’s the best social platform, not because they’re making a political statement.

Self-custody wins when the tools are more secure and more usable than traditional banking.

The technology exists. The talent exists. We need the collective commitment to building freedom tech that wins on merit, not martyrdom. Products that solve customer problems first, with self-sovereignty as the inevitable result.

The infrastructure companies building today are laying groundwork that consumer products will build on tomorrow. The consumer products shipping today are teaching us what works and what doesn’t. Every improvement compounds, and every UX breakthrough makes the next one easier.

But we have to reject both traps. We can’t afford complacency—the assumption that we have time to wait for people to “wake up.” And we can’t afford elitism—the attitude that excludes anyone who doesn’t already understand why permissionless protocols matter. Both guarantee we stay niche while the world adopts worse systems with better experiences.

The window to build viable alternatives is real. It’s not closing tomorrow, but it will close. And the opportunity is extraordinary.

To the Bitcoin startups, Nostr developers, Lightning infrastructure teams, and freedom tech builders working on this right now: you are building the financial, identity, and communication infrastructure that can define the next century. The protocols you’ve built work. They’re secure, they’re fast, they’re censorship-resistant. You’ve done the hard part.

Make them accessible. Make them usable. Make them undeniable.

Then we win.