Introduction

Shortly after reading Scott Alexander's LessWrong Crypto Autopsy I found myself agreeing with the point so strongly I was brainstorming ways that its dismal outcome could have been prevented. Peoples personal accounts of why they didn't buy bitcoin seemed to converge on a central theme: Buying Bitcoin was a trivial inconvenience. Pondering what might be done in light of this, I was reminded of Boston Rat's Bureaucracy Day. The Bureaucracy Day is essentially a designated day for people to beat the ugh field effect by getting together and going through the whole mess of annoying tasks, paperwork, and other trivially inconvenient things people have been putting off. Having been impressed by the concept the first time I read about it, Scott's dire analysis convinced me to try something like it in the hope that it would be a useful tool against this sort of thing happening again.

Design

Preliminary Steps & Research

The actual idea came to me when a friend linked Scott's post. From the first paragraphs I was taken by the premise, and lamented how I had the opportunity to buy Bitcoin when it was pennies but didn't. For me the sting is even greater because I'd been tempted to buy an entire thousand dollars worth, but eventually decided against it. (As Scott points out in his post, I was especially being an idiot since just buying 10 bucks worth would have made me a much wealthier man.) Part of why I didn't was I was under the impression my only option for buying was essentially meeting someone in person that mined it. I'm unsure exactly when this was, but it's quite possible I was thinking about this pre-exchange and that was the reality.

As I was sitting there thinking about this, I remembered the Boston Rat post and felt it was a good starting template for solving this issue. I said to my friend:

Okay, here's my idea. Are you aware of Boston rat's "Bureaucracy day?" We do "Trivial Inconvenience Day". Where we get people into a giant IRC room. Or Discord or whatever. (IRC is easier to use a web client for without sign up.) And have people make a list of s*** they know in the abstract they should do but are putting off. And then we all do it together and talk about having done it. Sort of like a baptism, but for buying cryptocurrency or fixing my website. >_>

The friend...

Trivial Inconvenience

Blog posts

See also

Trivial Inconvenience

Blog posts

See also