Welsh just beat me to the punch by mentioning the technical difficulties that most people are likely to experience if they want to use bitcoin. I would like to see more user-friendly applications and devices make safety, security, privacy easier to attain for the less technically skilled (like my mom.)
Right. Even securing Bitcoin probably needs to become a little easier. I do believe that hardware wallets have brought us leaps, and bounds in terms of ease of use. However, there's an additional cost to that, whereas a lot of people will not want that additional expense.
Even if we say that's their problem, really we should be considering it our problem since adoption means making it as easy as possible to not only understand, but to access the most secure ways, without actually understanding security to a good level. Fiat you currently can do that, at the expense of a third party. I imagine in a decade or so, banks will be offering their services for Bitcoin, at least the security aspect. Now, for me personally I would never entertain the idea of using a bank for the majority of my wealth again, but I have to admit some people will probably benefit from it.
The other issue that I think some newbies have a hard time accepting is that bitcoin transactions are not reversible. Obviously it's a safety feature on one side of the transaction, but since most consumers have become used to being coddled by big banks, they just assume that they can change their minds about a purchase after the fact. That mentality needs to be reversed.
Yeah, I'm not sure we're ever going to overcome that mentality. Humans like convenience, and the non reversible aspect of Bitcoin only really appeals to certain types of people. I guess what we could see in the future is a organisation which has a large share of the network, which offers a
chargeback service by trying to reverse transactions that have been made fraudulently. I mean, I think we're starting to get into tin foil hat territory there as the costs wouldn't likely justify it, but that might play a part in the justification for having a large network share.
It's impractical to expect everyone who owns bitcoin to contribute to mining, but that would be a practical preventive measure.
Not even because of the cost in doing so (which I'm ignoring for now), but the fact that you're then raising the bar for accessibility since mining takes a bit of knowledge to get going.