The secret friction of the hidden execution that Midnight does not conduct privately was what in my mind kept on nagging.

It is pre-privacy onboarding its debt.

That is the part people skip.

Even the experience of the private app pre-launch requires an additional ceremony on the current wallet path. Lace Midnight Wallet is still in beta, after which you must have a Cardano wallet, after which you must enable Beta features, then add a Midnight wallet, and local proving is still based on a proof server that runs on Docker. Even development support is now Linux and Mac, not windows. It is not a mere footnote set up. This is much in the way of trust and tolerance that the product has not yet deserved.

That is when I began to find @MidnightNetwork more serious. Secrecy of data is not the only hard problem. It is also minimizing the number of functioning baggage a user or builder has to carry to experience privacy in the first place. That very mess makes midnight look more significant since the promise will only be relevant when the first mile does not have the feeling of being heavier than the app itself.

And there too, at the same place, $NIGHT clicks through mechanism. NIGHT may produce DUST and DUST may be made to execute, however that refined resource model is only of interest when the wallet path, beta path, and proving path are already operational. Even a good token design will not rescue a hapless initial encounter.

The question that I am still monitoring is this: will Midnight be able to make the first setup so invisible before mainstream users ever see the stack beneath it?

Since with respect to privacy, extra ceremony is the only starting point, it is not confidentiality that becomes the bottleneck.

It is patience.
$NIGHT #night @MidnightNetwork