Today we released Safely, a Bitcoin wallet that cares about its users. On the surface, it does not look like much: you can send and receive your coins, play with a price chart, organize your wallets. But Safely is much more than that. It gives you three things: care, rigidity, and the future. To understand the philosophy behind Safely and where it’s going, let’s start with the significance of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin’s impact on civilization

For years I have argued that Bitcoin is not merely a currency or tool, but a global social experiment shaping our civilization. Its participants seek voluntary consensus despite psychological, political, and physical resistance, overcoming fear, uncertainty, and doubt. We are witnessing proof that self-interested individuals can reach consensus on private property rights and maintain an accurate record of it in a hostile environment.

After 17 years, Bitcoin adoption continues to grow. Extrapolate that process to a world that has fully embraced Bitcoin, and bitcoin becomes a reserve currency, portable and liquid, for countries and savers, putting an end to unlimited fiat inflation absorbing value from real estate, index funds, gold, etc. Once people use unified money that does not know political borders, it is only natural to expect breakthroughs comparable to the Industrial Revolution.

To realize this potential, we, the society, have to adopt this technology into our lives.

Social game requires care and rigidity

Bitcoin is a pinnacle of the cypherpunk movement that began in the early 1990s. Cypherpunks argued: we already had networks, personal computers, and strong cryptography; now we could build a new kind of society with secure communications, confidential electronic money, and all the other things that might emerge from them. In other words, the true value of these technologies emerges only at scale, with society adopting them at large.

But not everyone is a cypherpunk or computer scientist. Most people need reliable, simple tools for using a new kind of money. If those tools are inconvenient, people return to proven alternatives such as fiat currencies and banking. If they are convenient but not rigid, they fall victim to attacks or disappoint their users.

It is not enough for Bitcoin to remain a robust do-it-yourself tool in the hands of the enlightened, although it has already made a dent in the universe. To make a civilization-scale difference, it must be deployed widely and deeply: it must work for a billion people across a multitude of use cases. Such a deployment requires two things: care and rigidity.

We follow these principles in the design of Safely. We organize wallets, keep the hierarchies flat, and sweat the little details such as the time axis on a price chart. We’ve created an end-to-end encrypted synchronization protocol so that wallets can be stored redundantly across your devices without requiring you to keep track of recovery phrases and passwords manually.

As more people use Safely, we must ensure that it does not become a liability for them or for us. To keep Safely rigid, we are building an open-source, cross-platform application for mobile and desktop so that no single app store can lock us out. Our synchronization protocol is fully opaque to our infrastructure, that is, it reveals no personal information. Our servers are fully dispensable by design.

The future of Bitcoin

It is not enough to apply care and rigidity to the infrastructure around Bitcoin as it exists today. We must also advance Bitcoin itself: its consensus and its asset. The cryptocurrency ecosystem is currently stuck at a local optimum and requires a new approach to move forward.

At the time of writing, the estimated capitalization of all bitcoins is 1.6 trillion U.S. dollars, while the estimated value of all cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, is 2.6 trillion. The exact numbers are not important; the proportion of Bitcoin to altcoins has remained broadly similar for years. Bitcoin, as a reliable store of value, represents roughly two-thirds of the market, while the remaining third is spread among networks offering a wide range of technological advances.

Here is one way to look at it: two-thirds of the market values the asset “bitcoin,” while one-third values “functionality.” In terms of immediate utility—speed, privacy, programmability, and scale—Bitcoin is behind many altcoins. Its throughput is low, its smart contracts are limited, it has little built-in confidentiality or support for decentralized applications, and upgrades are deliberately difficult. That conservative design is also the basis for Bitcoin’s reliability as a store of value.

At the same time, altcoins form a fragmented landscape: some optimize for privacy, others for programmability, and still others for speed or scale. Each project focuses on cutting-edge technology in certain areas while trading off other properties. Most such projects trade off censorship-resistance and decentralization in the name of commercial interests or particular engineering choices.

I call this situation a local optimum because we have strong evidence of demand for both a strong financial asset and rich functionality on decentralized networks, yet the two do not intersect.

Bitcoin currently remains limited to being a store of value (and possibly a reserve currency) rather than a ubiquitous electronic cash. Just as the functional limitations of gold led to the dominance of paper money and banking, Bitcoin’s limitations lead to people using centralized, fiat-backed stablecoins instead of trading in bitcoin itself.

This is where Flame comes in.

To move Bitcoin beyond that impasse, we need to extend Bitcoin without changing its core. Flame is such an extension and a derivative currency that stands firmly on top of the security of proof-of-work. Flame is an electronic cash for everyday use, with faster transactions, built-in confidentiality, and programmable decentralized applications. Flames are created by burning bitcoins, which is the basis of the Flame consensus protocol.

We take Bitcoin seriously. To advance the Bitcoin economy, we build Safely with the utmost care and rigidity. We build Flame on top of Bitcoin to create powerful electronic cash, and we integrate Flame natively into Safely to bring that utility to life.

The next chapter of Safely is Flame.