In the end, I think the cryptocurrency 'format' with the most user-friendly features (as opposed to the most technology advanced) will win. We see this time and time again in different industries, and ours is probably no different.
We have only to realize that we should begin surveying actual potential users to find out what they want in a digital currency, starting with those who might need it most.
There is a reason why alt coins are pump&dump or only dump. Doesn't matter how cool the coin is, how fast it is, how many coins it has, how anonymous it is, what matters is how many people use it. Bitcoin is old, slow, with asic miners. But it is the king of all the coins and will be for very long time. It is not because it was first, but because it has huge backbone of services. People in crypto are not common people, they think different and it is their main disadvantage. Real money is owned by common people. Rich people will not invest if they do not see profit by selling coins to common poeple.
There is a reason why credit cards are used heavily even with huge fees. Merchants love to pay 3-5% fee, because they know 99% of western world people own credit cards. everyone want to sell rather 100 products with 5% fee than 1 product with 0% fee. I myself love to pay 30% fee to google play for in app purchases. They made payment process so easy, that conversion on google play is multiple times better than on the same product on web. I earn much more on same amount of people paying 30% fees, than paying 5% fees on web apps.
Similar it is with CASH. Why do people hold CASH in banks? There is almost no interst, but there are fees. For most of the people having money in bank is losing money. But having money in bank is comfortable and saver than having them at home. This is the problem of crypto, people are talking we need security, we need anonymity, we need sidechains, we need paper wallets, etc.... WRONG and again WRONG. We need CENTRALIZED trusted services. We need easy to use TRUSTED web services, where people can BUY/SELL/pay with their wallets like in PayPal. Doesn't matter how fast is confirmation on coin, no coin can be as fast as credit card or PayPal. This is the reason why BTC is the winner. Coinbase, Bitpay, blockchin.info made it easy to use for merchants and other web developers. They made it easy to use for common people.
Another problem are chargebacks, chargebacks are bad for merchants, but very important for customers. Merchants will not add crypto, if customers do not want it. Hence, there is no other way, than centralized trusted service on top of crypto to maintain chargebacks somehow internally on their virtual wallets.
So I think, do not lose time on tech staff, doesn't matter how cool you make the coin itself, it will not bring the value. It will just bring the story to be used to pump the price on cryptsy chat. And even if you implement something unique, 1 day later will some scammer clone your coin. He will have better pump team, more money for promotion and you will realize you did hard work and he earned your money.
I think we need to create working backbone of API's, libraries, trusted centralized services for easy to integrate payments. We need to give noobs option to play with KARM. Trust me, it is really hard to work with that, even if you have lot of coding exp.
There is no documentation about what are the differences between KARM and BTC. I lost hours studing KARM and BTC code to find out very basic staff. BTC is well documented, we just need documentation about the differences in constants, protocols, addresses and transaction creation. Noone will read KARMA code to implement wallet on his service. Forget that.
With having that documentation, we have to take BTC libraries one by one and clone them to KARM. There is no other way. If we clone them, than all the services using those libraries will implement KARM themself. We have to put those libraries on github, well document them and write tutorials for noobs.
We have to write tutorials and examples how to use them.
We need to create HTML+JS embedable codes with just copy&paste requiremnt, so various blogers, CMS frameworks can implement them easily.
Talking about community work. Karm has big disadvantage, or maybe advantage, that very few people own 50% of all KARM. It is around 500k USD, (in case of enough buying power). Those people are heavily invested and they have 2 options:
1) Ask others to help, which will not work, people do not work for free, especially when they know they are making rich someone else
2) Pay others for the help. They can pay with KARM. Those very few people does not have enough time and power to make KARM no 1. alt coin, maybe not even no. 10. It is simple math. If you own assets, worth pottencialy houndred of millions in future, but worth maybe only few BTC now(since there is not enought people to buy it) you should think about those assets as investment. If you do not invest now, you will not earn in future. It is much better to invest 50% and pay pro devs with KARM to make coin 10x valueable fast or you can just hope for pumps or miracles.
From my point of view, I will finish explorer, and maybe I will finish some web wallet. Than I will focus on my BTC projects, if they will work, I will port them to KARM(could never happen). So I am not willing to work on the KARM after. I do not have time for this. I will help somehow, but the devs are 50% owners of KARM, they should do the hard work(or pay for it) to make them wealthy.
Imo, we should recognize that people spend most of their time playing with a smartphone. If we can integrate smartphone ecosystem into our Karma project, this would be great.
Also, for average Joe and "Jane", earning Karma should be easy and intuitive. If my wife can earn meaningful amount of Karma easily, she will donate, tip, and use it for many purposes.
