This is a subject that I feel strongly about if we want BNS to actually get traction.
I discovered Stacks through BNS, which is a real possibility of how future users will find Stacks if BNS is successful. Regardless of how a user finds BNS, I’m providing a simple use case on how this affects onboarding and not only makes BNS difficult but goes against what the industry has set as a standard. Like it or not, this is what users are expecting. Now I ask that you think of this as if you were a new user or a business.
You’ve already purchased your domain/Identity on a service like UD or ENS. It was simple, straight forward and you could grab the multiple domains/identities you needed in one shot. It only took a few minutes.
You want to also get your .btc (.id, etc…) domains to cover all your bases. So you come over to BNS. You open a wallet and transfer some BTC to it. Now you realize you need STX, so you go to an exchange and swap some BTC for STX. You try to get multiple domains because most businesses and users hold multiple domains (redirects, additional spellings, etc…), but wait you can only get one domain per address. Crap, ok now you need to create a few more addresses, oh and you have to transfer enough STX to each address to cover the costs for each domain. This is a slow process so now you’re waiting for confirmation that the STX arrived at each address. You’re new, so you do this one address at a time about 30 minutes to an hour for each address. After hours of work, you try to get your domains. If you’ve made it this far, now you have to manage each domain under its own address. I think you can see all the friction points in this simple use case, this doesn’t cover errors, mistakes, frontruns, etc…
This is fine for well-educated Web3 people but adds so many levels of difficulty for the average user that many will simply move on and say nevermind. In order to get adoption, you have to look at how the average person will look to use your system.
Each step is a point of friction and will have users abandon the process.
If there are members of BNS that feel so strongly about having an address identified by a single address then compromise and allow multiple domains per address, with one address set as the Primary domain/idenity.
In marketing and sales it’s very important to get it down to as few clicks as possible, with each new click your abandon rate increases. This is business 101 and if business is a dirty word, it’s adoption 101.