What is the main challenge that cryptocurrencies will have to meet in order to popularize and spread it worldwide, where everyone uses it?
Let me ask you a few questions back:
Do you find Bitcoin easy to understand?
Do you find Bitcoin easy to use?
… You’re lying! 🙂
How many of you find Bitcoin easy to secure, your individual wallets?
To backup, to make available to your families in the case of your death or incapacity?
Until everyone reading this can do it – more importantly, until your mom can do it… bitcoin cannot be adopted broadly.
We have a lot of work to do. That means taking a technology that, at the moment, is difficult to explain, difficult to use, to secure on an individual basis (though very secure on a global basis but very difficult to secure on individual basis). Difficult to plan for your retirement or to pass on to your family.
All of these things need to be fixed.
But you’ve got to look at it as an engineering problem, which is also an engineering opportunity. I sent my first email in 1989. In order to send my first email, I had to download a mail client in source code, use a compiler to compile it and make it an executive application on a UNIX system, with the command line on a modem, through an account that I wasn’t strictly speaking authorized to use. Because I was young and I had access to the internet in 1989.
After two or three hours of work with my UNIX command-line skills that I had just recently learned, I composed my first email. First, I had to find someone to send it to, because there weren’t that many people on the internet then. I sent an email… and in the blink of an eye – just 36 hours later – it arrived at its destination.
If you had asked me then, “Will you do your banking and shopping on this? Will your mom use this? Can you do video calling with your mom on this?” I would have said: “Yes, but it will take few decades.”
Exactly twenty years later, my mom sent her first email, and she didn’t have UNIX command-line skills. She swiped her finger on her iPad. That’s what we have to do.
You can look at that as a challenge; I think of it as an opportunity. An opportunity like that created a multi-billion dollar industry for search, and multi-billion dollar industry for email, a multi-billion dollar industry for online services, a multi-billion dollar industry for internet service providers, a multi-billion dollar industry for tablets, for mobile phones, personal computing devices and all of the other things that we’ve seen.
The person who sees it as a challenge is the pessimist. The person who sees it as an opportunity to create a billion-dollar industry, I call that person an entrepreneur. And entrepreneurs can’t succeed without investments, so there is a room here for literally everyone.
All that entrepreneurs needs this mental attitude: “If I make cryptocurrency (that you don’t need to know how it works in order to use it) easier to use, to secure, to understand, I can build a very successful business.
I made a Bitcoin so that you as end user don’t need to understand Bitcoin to use it. I guarantee you that there are not more than few people who will ever read this blog post, but who understand how TCP/IP windowing or Las Vegas QoS properties within TCP work; how an HTTP protocol message is formed.
All of this has been used when this website loaded on your screen. Yet you use the internet without needing to understand any of that.
Bitcoin, or any other cryptocurrency, will be successful and adopted broadly when you don’t need to understand ANYTHING about how it works, and yet you can use it. And then, your mom can use it.
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