About Dash
Dash is the most “painless” coin out there
When it comes to being user-friendly, there is no competitor. Search the App Store or Play Store for “Dash wallet.” Download the first one that comes up. Scan a QR code. Send. Costs pennies at most, and works smoothly and quickly. Now you can buy stuff with it. Cryptocurrency fans and new users alike are always surprised and impressed at how painless Dash is to use, even before the release of the much-vaunted Evolution platform. That’s its main competitive advantage.
For commerce, there is no serious competition
Even for as big of a Dash fan as I am, I was a little surprised at just how overwhelmingly it dominated the vendor space. Just about every vendor that was able to take cryptocurrency accepted Dash, and the vast majority of cryptocurrency sales were in Dash. Not more than any other coin, not even more than every other coin combined, but several times more than every other coin together. In markets with heavy use of cryptocurrency, as well as in the future when such payment options become more widespread, no other coin even comes close to Dash.
There’s a crying need for a one-stop beginner site
I take some personally responsibility for this. There’s no super user-friendly site for learning about Dash anywhere. There’s some landing pages, the main Dash.org site is okay, but there’s a big gap between that and what is needed for beginners. This was part of the vision with DiscoverDash.com, which means it’s one of my priorities to get it finished and perfect as soon as possible.
Some technical elements need to be removed from the user experience
This is true of every coin, and while Dash has fewer technical issues that everyday users have to deal with, there’s still a couple. For one, I learned that InstantSend needs five previous confirmations in order to send. Every few transactions it wouldn’t let me use InstantSend and I had no idea why. Turns out, I had my entire balance in just a couple inputs, and every time I sent out a small amount that larger amount had to be split up into smaller pieces. Doing that meant that parts of the balance became unconfirmed as they were sent back to the wallet, and I had to wait to use InstantSend again. My partner didn’t have this problem because his wallet had received his balance in many smaller transactions.
While it’s really easy to either split up your inputs or wait a little in between transactions, someday an average user is going to be really frustrated when they try to pay for something and it doesn’t work. They won’t know why. Some tweaks have to happen back-end, like making sure spending wallets automatically split up balances into smaller denominations, so that the end user never experiences these hiccups.
About Crypto Fans
Most are fans, few are users
More than a technology, crypto is a culture. Many are fans, plenty have bought some, a few carry some in mobile wallets, almost none regularly use it. Sadly (to me), more own a t-shirt of a coin than own a wallet of that same coin.
Even among experts, knowledge gaps exist
Of course, cryptocurrency is new and there remains much to be learned. However, the barrier to entry into the “expert” field is very low, and even those who are legitimately knowledgeable have large gaps in their knowledge base. How much does each of these coins cost to send? What’s their transaction volume like? Have they had a backlog? Do any special features work? Especially in terms of the practical, there’s few real experts.
Privacy fans tend to be hardliners
Run-of-the-mill crypto fans tend to be relatively friendly and open-minded. Fans of privacy-centric coins tend to be more aggressive and uncompromising, even among the kind and polite. This may be because privacy options enable a lifestyle of social exclusion, or because support for features which enable ethical economic activity as well as the unethical without bias tends to require strong personalities to defend unquestioningly.
About Mass Adoption
Cryptocurrency is in no way ready for mass use
We’ve come a long way, but there’s still a few elements of using cryptocurrency that keep it from being ready for prime time. If you can’t either easily copy/paste an address, or scan a QR code, crypto becomes unusable. Storage and recovery are a pain, and most new users will simply lose a phone with lots of money on it. And, of course, price fluctuations keep it from being used to price goods and services.
Offline payments will need to become viable
It’s simple: if your phone dies, is misplaced, or even has spotty connectivity, you’re out of luck. There needs to be an offline payment solution before this goes mainstream.
Whoever comes up with the first seamless merchant solution will win big
Merchants are usually the toughest new user to crack, not because they’re unwilling, but because they have quite a few complex sets of considerations in order to get set up, especially tax and accounting. There’s nothing for them right now. Design the first all-inclusive, seamless merchant solution for cryptocurrency, and you’ve won the world.
Fiat currency has pain points, too
Just because of how emergent cryptocurrency is doesn’t discount how much of an improvement it can be over the status quo. Signing up for financial services is a lengthy process full of sensitive information. Sending is expensive and complicated depending on the recipient. International businesses go through extreme headaches processing all the different currencies around the world. When the infrastructure behind cryptocurrency becomes as smooth and seamless as that of fiat currency today, switching will be an easy sell.
