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Getting started

What BSV is, the five things to know before drawing anything, and where to start if you design products, research them or found them.

This section is where to start, whether you design BSV products, research them or found them. Read the five things below, then follow the route for the work you do this week.

BSV is bitcoin with fees of a fraction of a penny and capacity that grows with demand, and payments pass directly from one wallet to another.

What "bitcoin" means here

Used precisely, bitcoin is the set of chains secured by SHA-256 whose history runs back to the genesis block of 3 January 2009. Used in this guide, it means BSV. Where the network needs naming precisely, a page says BSV.

The guide's job is to tell you what to draw, so it describes one system properly. Where a habit carried from elsewhere would cost a user money or ship a broken , the page says so on the spot. See Bitcoin in the glossary.

Five things to know first

  1. Apps never hold keys. An app asks the user's wallet to pay, sign or prove something. Your connect flow is a permission conversation.
  2. The sender's wallet hands the payment straight to the recipient's wallet, with the proof needed to check it. The recipient knows at once, so there is no waiting spinner.
  3. Fees are negligible, so there is no fee picker, no fee estimate, and no stuck transaction to explain.
  4. Payments of a few satoshis are practical, so charging per article, per request or per second is a real option rather than a thought experiment.
  5. A backup is two things: the keys, and the wallet's own records of what the keys are for.

The Patterns section turns each of these into screens, and How it works explains the technology behind them. The hard parts sets out what stays difficult even when you know all five.

Where to start

The guide is for three kinds of reader. Most people are more than one of them; start with the one you are this week.

For designers

You are drawing the screens. Read in this order:

  1. Design principles, the commitments every page holds products to.
  2. The hard parts, for the problems the patterns answer.
  3. Connecting a wallet, because almost every app starts with it.
  4. Amounts and units, because almost every screen has a number on it.
  5. The rest of Patterns, for the task in front of you.
  6. A reference design, to see the patterns put together: the Daily spending wallet if you are building a wallet, or the Pay-per-use reader, Connected web app or Agent with a budget if you are building what a wallet connects to.

Then work through a checklist before you ship.

For researchers

You are finding out what people need and whether the design works. Read in this order:

  1. Conducting research, for the three constraints that real money adds.
  2. User personas, five people to recruit for and design against.
  3. Getting to know your users, for the two kinds of barrier.
  4. Usage life cycle, for where people stop, stage by stage.
  5. Published research, for what has already been studied.

The guide's rules are claims about people, and most were reasoned rather than measured. The Research overview explains how to test the ones your product depends on.

For founders

You are deciding what to build, for whom, and how it earns. Read in this order:

  1. The hard parts, for the problems every BSV product meets sooner or later.
  2. Business models, for what small, final payments make possible.
  3. Pricing, for charging in the unit people think in and settling in satoshis.
  4. Custody as a product decision, for who holds the keys and what that commits you to.
  5. Measuring a product, for the numbers that mean something here.

The rest of Product and business covers growth that pays and how much to say about BSV.

What is in this section

Related

Written from: BSV wiki, Chronicle upgrade notes, BRC-100.