Wallet of Satoshi Stops Serving US Customers
It was about a year ago that I made my first purchase with Bitcoin Lightning. It was a tasty cappuccino from a vendor at Bitcoin Miami. I had read about Lightning but hadn’t had an opportunity to use it before. I was blown away by how fast and easy it was to do realtime, peer-to-peer transactions. The first Bitcoin Lightning wallet I used was Wallet of Satoshi.
I’ve continued to use Bitcoin Lightning. Unfortunately not for payment of goods. But my son has a Lightning wallet and we exchange funds with Lightning regularly. I’ve also onboarded at least 20 different people to Bitcoin by having them install Wallet of Satoshi, and then I put 1,000 sats (Satoshis, or 1/100,000,000 of a Bitcoin) in their wallet. It is simple, fast, and an eye opening experience.
All of this is to say that I was sad to hear about a month ago that Wallet of Satoshi is not going to operate in the United States anymore.
Here is an excerpt from their post on Nostr:
We’ve dedicated ourselves to providing the best Bitcoin experience with Wallet of Satoshi, being at the forefront of Lightning usability and adoption. However, we’ve made the difficult decision to remove our app from the U.S. Apple and Google app stores, and will not serve U.S. customers going forward.
They aren’t specific about why they are doing this. I suspect it likely has to do with Know Your Customer requirements. Wallet of Satoshi doesn’t require anything. You can just install it, receive funds, and send funds. It is super simple.
Since they are not allowing transfers into US accounts I sent all my sats from Wallet of Satoshi to my Strike account, via Lightning of course. It was fast and free. No worries. I’m going to keep Wallet of Satoshi installed and hope that someday in the future I can again start using my favorite Lightning wallet. ⚡️
New POAP Onboarding Process
A year ago (exactly!) I shared my POAP Wishlist which included three areas that I felt would be great additions to POAP. It is a year later and I still think POAP is a wonderful product, and I continue to issue and collect these proof of attendance tokens.
One of the areas that I called out was Web2/3 Onboarding. Specifically I noted that while token claim codes could be used to reserve a POAP (not minting it), the reservations themselves weren’t actionable. There was no email engagement to encourage the person that reserved it to mint the token. I also highlighted that POAP should make it easier for people that do not otherwise have an Ethereum wallet, and create a non-custodial wallet for them to use instead.
A couple weeks ago I noticed that POAP had a new beta onboarding process so I requested to be part of it, and they activated it for my 52nd Birthday drop. I gave it a try myself and I was excited to see that they had addressed everything I had wished for in this process!
Let’s take a look at the new process!
New Onboarding
Just as before, when you get a claim code you are presented with the option to get the token and you can provide a wallet address or Ethereum Name Service (ENS) name to directly mint it. You can also provide an email address to reserve the token to mint in the future.
With the new onboarding process when you provide an email address to reserve the token you get an email informing you of the next steps. Critically it presents options for you to act on!
Smartly they use language that people should easily identify with. Rather than saying “I don’t have a wallet” instead saying “Create an account”. To give this a test I chose to Create an account.
After clicking on this you are presented with a page where you can setup your account, which really means you are creating a brand new wallet address. I love that you can even specify an ENS name. I created thingelstad.onpoap.eth which got a brand new address 0xb81B…2056.
Behind the scenes this is powered by Privy to create an embedded wallet. The flow worked really well. After creating my new wallet I was then able to easily mint my POAP directly into that new wallet. Magic! 🪄
So this is great, and for a lot of people that only collect POAPs and do nothing else with crypto this is probably all that they ever need to do. But now that this wallet exists, I wanted to get access to it directly. After creating the wallet POAP send another email and this one includes those steps, and even points you to downloading Rainbow if you don’t know where to start.
I followed the directions, copied my private key, and was able to easily add the new wallet that POAP had created for me into Rainbow. 🌈
Conclusion
I’m incredibly happy about this new onboarding process. I’ve created 58 POAPs and most of my events are distributed to people that have never done anything with Ethereum before. I even created my own how to claim a POAP instructions to give people.
However, even with that it has proven too difficult for most people. With this new process, people will be able to claim and mint POAPs with nothing other than an email address! This is a big deal! I also think there are many crypto native people that may choose to do this as well. I isolate by crypto assets so I keep all my POAPs in an address just for them. Having POAP manage the wallet for me would be an even easier way to do that.
I’m eager for this new onboarding process to be the default and I think I can get rid of my “how to” page and simplify POAP distribution significantly. With this new process, POAP ease-of-use is much improved!
We all went to the new Mean Girls movie tonight. I had seen the 2004 Mean Girls a long time ago but didn’t remember that much of it. The musical interpretation was fun and had good moments.
There is certainly some luck involved with Microsofts early investment and partnership with OpenAI. However, the strategy they have built to bring AI to “where work happens”, productize it through Copilot, and create enterprise-ready capabilities to build off of is truly impressive.
Microsoft surpassed Apple to become the world’s most valuable public company. Microsoft was valued at $2.89trn as markets closed on Friday; Apple at $2.87trn. The iPhone-maker has been the most valuable listed firm for most of the past 12 years. But Microsoft’s investments in artificial intelligence have helped it catch up. The software giant last closed above Apple in 2021. — The Economist (Jan 13, 2024)
It might have been better if I never would have found out about these Bailey’s Irish Cream Minis. Delicious.
POAP 6968799 at SPS Web Fulfillment 2 Billion.
We watched Here Comes the Boom tonight. Kevin James is a great lead for this and the story has some laughs along the way.
Bitcoin ETF Approved
Milestone day to recognize — SEC Approves Bitcoin ETFs for Everyday Investors. Bitcoin doesn’t need this to validate it or prove value but it is a big plus for the credibility of Bitcoin. BTC currently at $46,611 now.
Questions:
- What will this do to Bitcoin demand?
- What does this mean for MicroStrategy (MSTR) as they are effectively a Bitcoin holding company (in part) now.
- If this “legitimizes” Bitcoin, what is the follow-on to Ethereum? And other blockchains?
My 52nd Birthday POAP was highlighted in the newest This Week in POAP. 🤩
Just set calendar event to pre-order Apple Vision Pro on January 19th! 🎉
