When I started exploring Bitcoin in 2012, my biggest concern was and still is to this day usability and key security. It was positioned by passionate enthusiast as the global decentralized currency of the future, but unless you were technically savvy, it was very difficult to use and secure. For mass adoption, that had to change.
As a former banker and now consultant, when I review innovations in cryptocurrency, I evaluate them not just on their technical merits but also whether the average person can understand and use it. I am not saying they need to fully understand the technology to use it, but they need to understand it enough to trust it and transact with it. Unfortunately, most of what I read is about wonderful innovations that very few people will be able to understand and use. If we want create a global alternative to fiat currency or some new utility token, we need to find solutions that will appeal to the widest audience possible. The means that it must be easy to use and hard to lose. As fun as it is to build new blockchain and distributed ledger architectures, radical new consensus protocols, or Zk-Snarks for privacy, we are falling short in producing anything that the average person can use. Take a glance at any Discord coin group and you will quickly see all the ways we have failed and yet we wonder why our cool new inventions are not being used. I saw this in early days and I still see it today, almost 6 years later.
When you look at most currency teams and what do you see? I see a significant number of developers, a few cryptographers, and maybe a couple of "business" people responsible for marketing. I think this is continuing evidence of the build it and they will come mentality that is all too prevalent, but is no longer viable due the increased competition from new coins.
Who is responsible for thinking about how the coin will be used in the real world? How will people transact with it? How do we ensure that even the average consumer can reasonably secure it from loss or theft? These are not easy questions to answer and may require us to rethink wallet design and key management. I believe we can develop new solutions to these problems, if we just put as much effort into solving them as we do into creating innovative coins.
In my opinion, any cryptocurrency that can solve this dilemma stands to gather significant mind and market share. The crypto space is large and growing fast, so If I missed a coin that has solved these challenges, please let me know in the comments below. I would love to take a look at it.