Why is Onboarding So Hard?

If you've ever tried to explain how Bitcoin works to anyone, you probably didn't get very far before your listener's eyes started to glaze over. And if you think getting someone to understand Bitcoin is hard, try getting them to actually use crypto.

The friction isn't just psychological. It's structural. To get started with crypto today, a new user typically has to create an account on a centralized exchange, pass KYC verification, fund the account with a bank transfer, wait days for it to clear, and then figure out how to actually spend or send anything. And that's before they've done a single useful thing with it. The crypto industry has essentially built a system that requires a finance degree and the persistence of a degen just to get to the starting line.

The sad part is that this complexity is mostly unnecessary. The underlying technology is capable of being far simpler to use than it currently is. And I believe the problem isn't the blockchain but the absence of compelling, everyday use cases that justify fighting through all that friction in the first place.

Solving Real Problems

Most onboarding discussions focus on the crypto newcomer struggling to get in. But what gets overlooked are the people who have something to offer and are waiting for a better way to monetize it.

Writers are a perfect example. The current options for independent writers trying to earn money from their work are genuinely terrible. You can try and build a subscriber base on a platform like Substack, but not only do they (and Stripe) take a significant cut of your earnings, but in order to even use their platform to earn, you need to charge a minimum subscription fee that can be significantly higher than your audience is willing to pay. On top of that, you can put your work behind a paywall but it requires readers to hand over a credit card, create an account, and commit to a monthly subscription just to read a single article. Either that or you can publish for free and hope that attention somehow translates into income.

None of these options are good. They're just the options that exist because building anything better used to require solving a payments problem that was essentially unsolvable until now.

The Reader's Dilemma

Readers have their own version of this frustration. How many times have you followed a link to an interesting article, only to be stopped by a paywall demanding you subscribe for $12 a month to read one piece you might never come back for? Most people just close the tab. The writer loses a reader. The reader loses access to something they actually wanted. Everyone loses, except the platform collecting subscription fees from the people who do sign up.

The subscription model made sense when payments were expensive to process and identity verification was necessary to manage billing relationships. But those constraints no longer apply. What's kept the model in place isn't technical necessity but inertia. Or in other words, no one built a compelling enough alternative.

Another issue for readers is privacy. Accessing content today almost always means revealing something about yourself: your name, your address, your credit card number, your date of birth. For what? To read an essay? The transaction between a reader and a writer should be simple and private. You pay a small amount, you get access to the content. That's it. No account. No profile. No data harvested and sold to advertisers.

The Proof of Writing Solution

Proof of Writing is built on the eCash blockchain to remove the friction on both sides of the equation simultaneously due to its strong infrastructure, high performance, and low fees.

For writers, the proposition is straightforward: publish your work, set your price, and get paid directly and instantly every time someone reads it. Our platform fees are significantly less than that of Substack. No waiting for a monthly payout. No minimum threshold before you see a cent. You write, you promote, people pay, the money arrives.

For readers, the experience is just as clean. See something you want to read, pay a small amount and get immediate access. No account creation. No subscription commitment. No credit card details stored somewhere waiting to be breached. No real name attached to your reading habits. Just a private, instant transaction that gets you what you came for.

This is what crypto was always supposed to enable. Speculative trading and pump and dumps lead to hyper-gambling, not long-lasting users. But I'm hoping that frictionless value exchange between people who want to transact directly with each other can onboard enough people to reach critical mass.

Why This Is the Answer to the Onboarding Problem

The fundamental insight behind Proof of Writing is that the best way to onboard someone to crypto isn't to teach them about crypto. It's to give them something they already want to do, and let the blockchain give them a better way.

A reader who pays to access an article on Proof of Writing isn't thinking about the eCash blockchain. They're thinking about the article. But they've just made their first crypto transaction and experienced firsthand what instant, private, low-cost payments feel like. And that experience — frictionless, private, immediate — is far more persuasive than any explainer about why crypto matters.

The same goes for writers. A writer who sets up their Proof of Writing page and gets paid instantly for the first time isn't becoming a crypto convert in the ideological sense. They're becoming someone who has felt the difference between the old way and the new way. That feeling is sticky in a way that whitepapers and Twitter threads simply are not.

The Bigger Picture

Every good use case that onboards people through genuine utility rather than speculation makes the entire ecosystem stronger. I believe Proof of Writing is one such use case and arguably one of the most natural fits for what eCash can do, because the thing being exchanged (written content) maps so perfectly onto what micropayments make possible.

The onboarding problem has persisted this long because nobody could point to something simple, useful, and immediately valuable that required crypto to do it better. I think Proof of Writing is that thing. Not because it's about crypto, but because it's about reading and writing, and crypto just happens to make the experience dramatically better for everyone involved.

Conclusion

Will Proof of Writing succeed in its mission? Only time will tell. But if you are reading this, consider yourself a pioneer in the peer-to-peer electronic cash movement, and the questions you have to ask yourself are:

Was this experience materially better than what came before?
If yes, do you think there are others out there who will feel the same way?
Would you share a link to this article with someone you know?

If you answered yes to all three, maybe, just maybe, we've got a shot at finally achieving what we've all been waiting for.

The onboarding problem and how we fix it🎧

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