I’ve always wanted to lower the barriers to entering the blockchain space. I want to make the experience of obtaining and holding crypto as simple as possible.

By recommending that people enter their private keys on our website, I inadvertently created a environment where phishing websites and scam websites thrived, registrars were being hacked, and attackers were coming up with increasingly sophisticated ways to steal money, like the recent BGP attack on MyEtherWallet.

Most disappointing is that other sites in this ecosystem followed our lead, amplifying the problem and teaching users to copy and paste their private keys onto any website out there.

Again this is not philosophical. This is not complicated. Do not let your users enter their private keys or mnemonic phrases or seed phrases or keystore files or other secret information on your website. Period.

It’s not secure. It’s training your users to be insecure. Build an Electron app. Use a Chrome Extension. Rely on MetaMask or Trust Wallet or Ledger or Trezor hardware wallets. If you don’t, you will spend all day, every day protecting against these attacks and trying to educate your users and creating pretty onboarding modals that yell at your users instead of, you know, just focusing on building your product like you should be doing. Let’s be safe by default.

What have we learned? What are the glorious takeaways from everything we have been talking about?

First, do not underestimate the people using your product.

Your users are smart, talented, intelligent people. You can educate them. You can teach them. They can learn. They can be retrained. They can get into crypto because of you and your product.

But! They are also naive and ignorant. They are really, really good at screwing things up. They carry assumptions with them. The world has taught them anything and everything can be recovered and there is no such thing as complete and utter loss.

Don’t underestimate them on either end of the spectrum and be prepared for everything.

Next, people will always—always—take the easiest path. If you allow them to skip steps or not back up their private keys, they will skip those steps and not back up their private keys. It will eventually negatively affect your product and your reputation and, most importantly, their experience with cryptocurrencies.

Education! Education helps a lot! Those tooltips and messaging and cute icons that help people identify core concepts can work wonders. But it only goes so far. You must build good habits in your users and set them up for success. You must empower your users.

If you find that your educational materials start yelling at your users, it’s time to take a step back and ask yourself how you can build a product that is safe and secure by default.

Learn from others mistakes. I just gave you five examples of ways we have already screwed things up. However, there are countless more. Work together. Talk to each other. Share experiences. Stay up to date on what is going on. Study where people failed and how attacks happened. Make it a priority to prevent it from happening again.

This goes hand-in-hand with the previous point: be mindful of the various attack vectors out there. This whole blockchain / cryptocurrency world is really, really different. The loss of a single string of information results in loss funds. The ROI for attackers is huge and allows them to spend a lot of time and effort and creativity on their attacks. They evolve. They change. They will do almost anything to compromise your company, your product, your team, or your users.

Always consider the “worst case” vs “best case” when making design decisions. Even if the design can result in a superior experience (the “best case”), if the worst case is lost funds then you need to take steps to prevent that loss.

Realize that building the decentralized future is really, really hard. This is why it is so important that we all work together and learn from each other. We want to be decentralized. We don’t want to hold people’s private keys and take custody, but that means we are entering a new frontier in authentication and usability and security.

Dedicate proper resources to solving complex problems and preventing bad things from happening to yourself, your company, and your users.

Always individually strive to be better and always push those around you to be better as well.

We need to realize, whether you are a developer or just an average person, whether you have been in this space for one year or two years or five years or two months, everyone has their role to play.

If you are seeing another product creator making a lazy choice, even if you are just an average person on crypto-Twitter, you play a huge role. You have the ability to ask questions. You have the ability to hold product creators accountable. Point things out. If they are doing something unsafe, question their choice and push them to make their product safer.

The best companies will take your feedback and questions to heart and strive to be better. I know I really cherish the messages that we get that are questioning my choices or pointing things out as they force me to be better.

Lastly, building together makes building this decentralized future a whole lot easier. This space is far too small for real competition. We have to all work together. We need to build this ecosystem up. Learn from each other. Help each other. Lean on each other. Be kind and helpful and connect to make this ecosystem stronger and safer.

We need to think about it as us—“us” being everyone reading this right now—vs the world. And the world is the big world out there that doesn’t even know what cryptocurrency is and has no chance of using it right now.

We can not be fighting with each other. We cannot be instigating Twitter drama. We cannot be dealing with little tiny pieces of bullshit. We need to be looking at the big picture. We need to focus on the world out there and conquering it.

I met with a lot of people at Devcon and I noticed a trend of people who had one foot in and one foot out. Some were working part time in the space or just observing from afar.

Let me tell you this: every single person has the ability to make this ecosystem better. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to code. We need the people who can write copy and design. We need the people that have endless patience to answer support tickets. We need people who will focus on making the entire experience better.

We need you all. We need the product people and the engineers and the project managers and the designers and researchers and everything in between. We need moms and daughters and fathers and sons and even the grandparents. We need people of different upbringings and backgrounds. Those who are college educated and that didn’t finish high school. In order for us to build a global, decentralized ecosystem, the people building that ecosystem that anyone in this entire world can use, the people building need to reflect that world. It cannot just be one demographic. It cannot just be the coders and the technical geniuses. It has to be everyone.

If you have one foot in, I need you to step all the way in. I need you to think about your unique skills and your unique experiences and figure out how you can make this ecosystem better.

If you want to help us specifically on our mission, email us at jobs@mycrypto.com and pitch yourself. We are always hiring remarkable people who want to make a difference.

And, that’s all I’ve got for you today. I hope you can carry this with you as you go out and build and create and help usher in this decentralized future.

I hope you have made connections here that will be lasting.

Thank you so much for sticking with me. I’m Taylor Monahan from MyCrypto. I love you all. 💖