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Topic: Bitcoin adoption: A technical challenge - page 4. (Read 877 times)

legendary
Activity: 1456
Merit: 1174
Always remember the cause!
October 20, 2019, 05:06:21 AM
#3
Bitcoin mass-adoption is subject to technical developments that should and can happen simultaneously in three critical fields: Decentralization, Scaling and Privacy.
Easy of use is also one that should be tackled. We have to be honest so ask yourself is Bitcoin easy to use and set up compared to other payment methods? I am not talking about other alts but about other alternative ways to pay online with fiat. It might be easy for us - the younger generation, but can your parents figure it out. Does your aunt know how to do it? Would she rather pay for her groceries with Bitcoin or her native fiat currency. There won't be any real mass adoption unless all generations understand and learn how to use the technology and it is not that easy. And you have no one to turn to if you make a mistake.  
I do agree. Ease of use is critical too, though it is a problem for second layer development I suppose, not the core. I mean leaving it to the market, couldn't we? I think if there was a true demand for a better user experience somebody would provide it eventually as long as it was feasible and supported by the core protocol.

I think to decide about your proposal of putting this topic, user experience or ease of use, in the critical list along with improved decentralization, scaling and privacy, we need to mention protocol level hurdles (if any) that prevent developers/market from providing such utilities.
legendary
Activity: 2730
Merit: 7065
October 20, 2019, 03:02:00 AM
#2
Bitcoin mass-adoption is subject to technical developments that should and can happen simultaneously in three critical fields: Decentralization, Scaling and Privacy.
Easy of use is also one that should be tackled. We have to be honest so ask yourself is Bitcoin easy to use and set up compared to other payment methods? I am not talking about other alts but about other alternative ways to pay online with fiat. It might be easy for us - the younger generation, but can your parents figure it out. Does your aunt know how to do it? Would she rather pay for her groceries with Bitcoin or her native fiat currency. There won't be any real mass adoption unless all generations understand and learn how to use the technology and it is not that easy. And you have no one to turn to if you make a mistake. 
legendary
Activity: 1456
Merit: 1174
Always remember the cause!
October 19, 2019, 09:34:26 AM
#1
Hi all,

I'm not a bitcoin whale not even a person who has bought like few coins and is praying for the price to skyrocket. On the contrary, I've exhausted all my coins and savings to keep myself full time focused on bitcoin as my research field instead of what I've been doing for years as an ordinary software engineer and a programmer. Not that ordinary in the latter field tho.  Tongue

So, from my point of view bitcoin adoption is not an urgent personal requirement at all. Actually I'm totally satisfied with what bitcoin has done up to now: great codebase, excellent discussions, a decade of 24*7 mission-critical task accomplished with almost no interrupts, absolutely no failure,  ... bitcoin is amazing from a technical perspective.

But before being a software guy, I'm a human being and an activist. I want peace and justice and equal opportunities and prosperity for mankind and health and safety and preservation of species for the planet. Actually bitcoin became my main technical concern because of its superiority in ethical aspects. It was the first field of commercial activity ever that I found to be coherent with my half/spare time occupation as an activist, it was why I quitted my job and stick with bitcoin, a life-time decision. Smiley

So, aliashraf the idealist, wants adoption to happen while aliashraf the dev does not care that much about it, why should he? Technical curiosity? come on, out there zillions of technical problems to masturbate with, in cryptocurrency and other IT fields, let alone physics and cosmology.

A bitcoin whale/hodler/investor faces a dilemma: on one hand, he needs bitcoin to be mass-adopted because it is what can eventually make bitcoin to skyrocket but on the other hand, there is a lot of contradictions that discourage him, most importantly, they don't like change and putting their assets in the risk of hypes and tensions. It is how it works, the real world, people are ready to invest a tiny fraction of their savings on a promising technology, but when it happens and they get rich, it will be time for conservatism, so natural.

People in bitcoin ecosystem are hybrids of devs, investors, activists, ordinary users, ... As long as we are asking about agendas and objectives it is totally about the ingredients: How much of each factor is presented in the anatomy of each person who is somehow active in bitcoin?

But no matter who you are and what's your priorities, bitcoin mass adoption is a goal you need to respect eventually because it is not just about expansion but about survival, systems either grow or collapse, without mass-adoption bitcoin will fade out.

Among many things that one can suggest for this to happen, technical challenges are the most important ones. Bitcoin is technology after all, isn't it? So, how is it possible to have bitcoin adopted by billions of people when it is faced with centralization and scaling challenges? Sure it is not possible and let's don't get the "world reserve currency" claims as serious rhetoric, they are not, ask a BS economics graduate.

My proposition in this topic is as follows:
Bitcoin mass-adoption is subject to technical developments that should and can happen simultaneously in three critical fields: Decentralization, Scaling and Privacy.


I strongly denounce Buterine's claim about the existence of a so-called trilemma which implies that it is impossible or (as he has retreated to it recently) very hard to achieve to such a state.

I am aware of the popularity of Buterine's trilemma among some bitcoiners, core devs and LN believers who are naysayers to ambitious improvement ideas because of the balance of the above-mentioned ingredients in their blood.  Cheesy
All I have to mention to these folks is that Buterine himself is retreating from his claim not only officially but also by advocating in favor of Serenity and Eth 2.0!

During my research, for a long time, I have mainly focused on decentralization targetting both ASICs and pools as evils, postponing scaling and privacy problems. To be clear, I don't believe in security as an independent problem, it is rather a spin-off from centralization scenarios. I formulated some ideas and proposals for both ASICs and pools, specifically, I made a thorough analysis of pooling pressure flaw in bitcoin and proposed an alternative approach to bitcoin like PoW systems which are based on a winner-takes-all idea, instead I proposed a collaborative proof of Work method.

Thereafter I began to realize that both centralization and scaling issues in bitcoin are by no means subjects of a trade-off unlike the poisonous ideas behind the trilemma of Vitalik Buterine and more interestingly they are not essentially and radically two different problems and both could be understood as consequences of the same (now, let's say) flaw: winner-takes-all.

My latest work is focused on a comprehensive solution to this problem and I think it is in a good state, almost ready to publish and I'll share it with bitcoin community asap, for the time being, I'm just wondering:

1) How important do you think such a project is?

2) Who is ready to jump in by dedicating actual resources to support/participate in a project tackling centralization, scaling, and privacy at the same time without any trade-offs, i.e without sacrificing one in favor of the other two?

Please note:
I'm talking about bitcoin, my agenda involves no forks and no alt-coins don't waste your valuable time debating about how bad is a  fork and how disappointing would be an alt.

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