Unveiling the Challenges Hindering Mainstream Adoption
In the ever-evolving landscape of digital innovation, cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology stand as transformative forces, promising a decentralized future for industries and economies worldwide. As we plunge into this blockchain frontier, a crucial question emerges: What are the key challenges and obstacles obstructing the mainstream adoption of these groundbreaking technologies?
To shed light on this inquiry, we reached out to our team of experts, each possessing a unique perspective and deep insights into the world of blockchain. Their responses unravel a tapestry of hurdles that, if addressed, could pave the way for the widespread integration of cryptocurrencies and blockchain solutions.
Join us as we dissect the intricacies and unveil the collective wisdom of our team in deciphering the roadblocks hindering the mainstream embrace of this revolutionary technology.
Mike
We live in an age when our perception of reality is changing faster than ever — an age of accelerating change. What I mean by that is that as we grow, we are growing faster. It’s exponential. This is something we must keep in mind.
I say this because what we assume today may be completely different tomorrow. The thought leaders of today are not necessarily the thought leaders of tomorrow. We just don’t know what we’re going to think or, more importantly, how we’re going to think in the future.
That being said, when we look at cryptocurrency/blockchain, I do see a few obstacles that must be tackled for humanity to enter a world of blockchain-based living. Hear me out:
Integrated Utility
As we see in the world, people love simplifying their lives. The more complicated we are, the more we yearn for simplicity. This simple concept raises one important hurdle that we’ve yet to overcome. Crypto is still ideating.
We’re still trying to invent new solutions. We’re still trying to find out new ways to get people to interact via limited-use tools. Much of crypto is siloed into miniature ecosystems with limited interrelationships. There is nothing wrong with this. This is how we ideate, invent, and grow.
This,however, has led to a fractured world we operate in. You use 20 different tools. You need 20 different tools. At the outset, we violate the principle of simplifying or rationalizing the human species’ wellbeing.
We’re adding complexity. This will keep many, if not most, of the world from adopting blockchain technology into their lives.
What we must do is ensure that the services, actions, and outcomes of our interactions with blockchain are integrated into a far more unified, simplified, and accessible system.
If one’s goal is to do X on the blockchain, then it should be the same as or easier than what we would find in the physical world as we currently know it.
I know at Sonar, this is a core principle we build upon. This is why our ecosystem exists. I digress…
Intuitive UX
Adding on to the concept of rationalizing blockchain technology, we must not forget that the user experience (UX) itself must not be overly complicated. To me, it seems that a lot of what is built is overly complex in its operation and design. I understand that the technology itself is complex. I understand that information overload is sometimes necessary because blockchain is still in its infancy and needs to earn trust. I understand that we’re learning how to wield new languages. I understand that making things overly complicated can make them appear to be more powerful or functional… But this hurts us in the long run to onboard humans as a whole.
Design principles and user-facing aspects of the blockchain need to be far more logically ordered and focused around ease of execution. This does not mean we need to lose the depth, complexity, or power of a tool. It means that we need to be more sophisticated and minimalized in the user-product interaction realm. Remember, there is a lot of sophistication in understatement.
Tax Structure Simplification
This is a quagmire from the outset, but it nonetheless should be mentioned. Without a clear definition of one’s tax responsibilities as a citizen of <insert nation state>, crypto will always experience a growth hiccup. A lot of capital in the world is highly risk-averse. Not knowing the tax implications of an investment, many will avoid making the investment at all.
Maybe it’s as simple as taxes baked into gas: a flat transaction tax broken down and paid into respective nation states by their IP geolocation.
Maybe it’s as simple as only taxing fiat at on- and off-ramp events.
Maybe…
Maturation of Blockchain Vision and Development
Before I get into this, I do want to acknowledge that there is real, deep thought into the vision of where blockchain/crypto wants to go. We don’t lack visionaries. The only reason I bring this up is that the current narrative that we, the collective, allow to persist does not actually match our long-term vision. We, as a collective, have a real knack for taking a passenger seat in the ongoing development of our current state of blockchain technology.
Ultimately, I believe we really need to mature in our ability to have a general conversation as the blockchain community. We need to understand why we’re here. Are we here just to trade tokens? Are we here to develop useful technology? Here, I’m talking about blockchain users more than developers. Users need to take a far more mature approach to selecting, using, and demanding tools that match the end goals of where they wish to be. It is our responsibility to advocate, demand, and use blockchain technology as we, the users, build a blockchain-based society.
In effect, if we demand and pay for frivolous use, we’ll receive frivolous use. If we demand and pay for paradigm-shifting use, we’ll receive a paradigm shift.
Ethics Manifesto
This is something that has always been in the deepest fiber of my being. We need, as a society, to devise an ethical code of conduct for our society with which we can hold others accountable. We need to have this conversation. We need to entrench principles in our future. If we want to build trust and, in doing so, onboard the world, we need to act as a society that promotes and builds for the public good. We, the people, have the capacity to set expectations for how we should and shouldn’t behave. We need to be able, as a society, to voice a strong, unified, and just response to those who do wrong in our society.
What does this look like? To me, I see a global ethics DAO. A DAO that allows our growing society to be able to discuss, debate, construct, and provide a set of guidelines that we come to expect from the people who build the tools for our future. Maybe this DAO provides a certification for projects, companies, etc. that allows us to identify those who provide a public good for blockchain integration into our lives.
Overall, I see the hurdles we need to overcome are ease of use, integration of daily life tasks and ownership of your data, simplification of tax structure, and our collective responsibility to be stewards of blockchain technology development.
I’ll leave you with this. That’s what I see today; it may not be what will be seen by someone else tomorrow.
What do you think?
Jacob
The most prominent barrier seems to be user experience.
When a new technology emerges, the initial emphasis is on innovation rather than accessibility. Reflecting on the early days of automobiles, where a hand crank was necessary to start the engine, or the initial televisions that required viewers to physically change channels, or the first cameras that were bulky and demanded manual adjustments. These groundbreaking technological innovations went through multiple stages of enhancements in user experience.
Presently, the realms of crypto and decentralized finance (DeFi) share similarities with these early iterations of technological products. The coming decades are poised to shape the evolution of this space into a user-friendly, easy-to-use, and efficient ecosystem, which will then lead to mass adoption.
Iwan
Acceptance and accessibility in my view are crypto’s current main obstacles.
Acceptance is a slow process that all currencies and stores of value ultimately had to go through in their history. Don’t think for one second that people just from one day to the next accepted paper money or promissory notes; which were ultimately just hand written statements from a supposed “trusted” source that they would pay the equivalent in gold. Even today, the USD still states that it is legal tender for all debts and is redeemable, yes redeemable, in lawful money at the US treasury or a federal reserve bank … I.e. it is still a promissory note, and one that isn’t actually redeemable at all if everyone took their cash to the US treasury at the same time.
So it starts with accessibility, the easier it is for all members of the general public to access cryptocurrencies (and let’s face it, it isn’t easy to date) and the easier it is for people to understand how it works and what the benefits are to them, the more likely people will use it.
Couple that with easy means of turning it into real world use either as conversion in other stores of value or as an accepted means of payment and it will become more widely useable, therefore accessible, and ultimately acceptable to use. It has already surpassed the banking system 100 fold, I can send money from Thailand to Belgium in a matter of seconds instead of multiple days, at a mere fraction of the cost if any cost at all, something which banking systems after hundreds of year still are incapable (or refuse) to do.
But if it can’t be used easily in Belgium then that still poses an issue, after all what good is money that you can’t spend? So it needs to be more accessible which comes with the desire for things to change, for old world systems to be updated to keep up with the times (which is something money is generally speaking terrible at), it comes with education.
The more people understand the benefits of crypto, the ease of access, and the financial freedom it can provide through education and academies, through learning on the fly with tools like Sonar that provide this information at people’s fingertips, the more it becomes accessible to others that they interact with and educate.
That accessibility is what drives acceptance, once we move from being on the fringe because you are “into crypto” to it being normalised and becoming the standard.
Obviously governments play a role in this, by providing protections, by providing regulation, without diminishing the very nature of the technology which is decentralisation. Many are on the right path, and while it will take time, slowly accessibility is improving and with it acceptance.
