First time user experience. I am a developer, but would like to shed light on what I encountered when discovering the world of Bit Coins.

After reading a taste of what BCs were I download the client (developer side) and fired it up (OSX). I was met with a string of characters not too frightening for a developer and especially not when expecting crazy encryption fun times to be going on. However, I didn't quite know what I was looking at or what it meant to me. I stumbled onto Bit Faucet and it introduced the notion that these characters were an address used to receive BC. So I learned something. At some point I clicked "New..." and my string of characters changed; this befuddled me a bit. Some more reading calmed me as it was "good practice" to generate these new addresses and use them liberally.

As I continued to learn about what I had gotten myself into it came to light that the client I had downloaded was the key to whatever BTC I began to acquire. So as a developer, my first questions were, "where is the secret key?", "how do I protect it?", and "how do I move it and still use this client?". All of these questions are being touched on in IRC and in this thread. So I'm glad to see the discussion is taking place. However, I have yet to see reasonable discourse that talks about what sort of experience our target end-user should see. When starting a conversion in IRC #bitcoin-dev about the above questions I quickly received answers such as: "just backup your wallet.dat file", "use truecrypt", "use gpg", "use a USB stick or dropbox", et cetera. My response is... DUH! The point of the discourse was not to get an answer I am perfectly capable of doing as a developer. It was to discuss how to make Bit Coins and the associated software accessible to our girlfriends, mothers, and fathers. So, with all of that context, and as a development brother looking at my experience as a first time user (while it is still fresh, I discovered BC two days ago and now have 40BTC, yay), I'd like to suggest the following:

Do NOT generate the secret magic sauce upon the client first loading, instead, provide an introduction screen that says, "Hey, welcome to the world of Bit Coins! Let's walk through a few concepts before you get started". Introduce the high-level concepts of: 1) you will be creating a wallet, 2) you generate "addresses" which others use to send you Bit Coins 3) your wallet is the key to accessing your Bit Coins, if you create another wallet on a different device, you will have two different "accounts" (like at a different bank)
Prompt the user to create a wallet, have the default directory available, but at least introduce them to where this super sensitive information is. Then show a generating magic sauce message with a repeated explanation that THIS IS IMPORTANT
I personally suggest integrating TrueCrypt as a sub-system of the BC client. Use a true crypt volumes to store either just the sensitive files or everything (good when using a portable USB key). Prompt the user to enter a passphrase so the true crypt volume can be created and used. People are used to passwords, opening the BC client and being prompted for a password by default won't alarm anyone.
True Crypt has done work to be used on portable devices. I recommend Bit Coin do the same and be completely runnable via a USB stick.
Provide a GUI level option to "backup your wallet" (ie. make a copy of the true crypt volume somewhere else). It would also be handy to be able to name your wallets and prominently display it in the client. When backing up the name would default to "Wallet Backup 2011-02-16" and the wallet would be marked as a backup. If a client opens a backup wallet, a warning could be issued stating as much and asking if this should now be considered a primary wallet (in the event of a restore)

My suggestions focus on education and features crucial to the adoption of Bit Coins, in my opinion. I cannot feel good about telling a non-techy about Bit Coins without these features. I want to be able to tell my girlfriend and her be able to make sense of the experience on her own. Thanks for all of the hard work thus far and I'm really enjoying my foray into the Bit Coins community.

Cheers,

Encrypt wallet #3

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