Very interesting article. This stood out: ‘Decentralization is a worthy goal, but in practice it seems that most Argentinians don’t care that much about it, at least not in the way purists talk about it. They’re more worried about whether the government can get their hands on their money; as long as the answer is “no,” they don’t seem to care much about who else has control over it.’

Bitcoin maxi’s should learn this lesson - people don’t really care about the philosophy, they just want the utility. Blind adherence to an ideology always turns off a bunch of people, and decreases the rate of adoption because many people are inherently skeptical of aggressive sales strategies. They feel like there is a gotcha.

Bear market is brutal hah

Creating a circular economy is essential for Bitcoin. Regardless of the drawbacks you just described.

The beef initiative has already done this, though it is only with beef. You may attempt to copy their model
https://beefinitiative.com/

You may also consider Galoy's model since they did develop a merchant network for a circular economy (Bitcoin beach)
https://galoy.io/bitcoin-banking-for-communities-lessons-learned-from-el-zonte/

Simple user experience suggestion, list by product type, not store name. Stores should be listed next to each other under product types. This is because I as the consumer do not first look at stores I've never heard of, but rather look first for product type, and then consider who's product of that type I may prefer.

Certainly.

Existing Bitcoin inheritance solutions roughly fall into 2 major categories:

1. Key duplication
2. Pre-signed transactions

The first one is relatively simple to understand (but not simple to implement), and probably the most common. Basically you would share all your keys and wallet data directly with the beneficiary, as well as the instructions to recreate said keys and wallet from scratch.

The problem with that is that this potentially creates a security vulnerability. You might be confident in your ability to safekeep sensitive key material, but it's hard to say the same for your family. The more copies of the keys you create, the easier you make it for a potential attacker. Furthermore, if the wallet is a multisig or uses a custom setup, the instructions can be quite difficult to follow, especially for someone non-technical. (You can perhaps "mitigate" this complexity by keeping your bitcoin in a singlesig wallet, but this comes at the cost of being more vulnerable to SPOFs).

Pre-signed transactions, on the other hand, require you to lock UTXOs. This technique interferes with your daily wallet usage. Every time you have a new transaction, you'd need to update the pre-signed transactions. You also need to pick transaction fees in advance, which may be problematic as we transition into the fees era, and the fee rate might become more volatile - the pre-signed transactions might get kicked out of the mempool. Last but not least, pre-signed transactions require you to pick the destination address/wallet in advance. This to me is its weakest point. The more time passes, the more uncertain we will be about what happens to the destination wallet. Will the beneficiary still have control over that wallet? Has any of its keys been compromised? etc. A lot can happen in 10-20 years.

Our Honey Badger solution solves this by having a dedicated inheritance key. The beneficiary does not need to know everything about the original wallet/keys in order to claim the inheritance. And we have tried to simplify the process as much as possible. The inheritance key is also time-locked, so you don't have the same vulnerability as the typical key duplication technique.

And of cos with that we are also able to sidestep all the problems with pre-signed transactions, since the inheritance claim happens on-demand on a future date, not now.

Hope this answers your question.