Wednesday, June 23, 2021

What is Required for Actual Mainstream Crypto Adoption [OPINION]

Nearly everybody in this sub believes that decentralized cryptocurrencies will play an integral part in our future (or at least some of us). However, crypto is barely being actually used. Yes, institutions are waking up to the potential of crypto, but investing and holding a coin/token are far from adoption. While smaller countries are starting to adopt Bitcoin and the lightning network as legal tender, the complexities of funding and opening channels (while still paying fees) turns off many to the idea.

When I see “credits” or money being used in futuristic or Sci-Fi movies/shows, I don’t see their society using money that costs fees to send, takes awhile to transact, or uses a significant % of their society’s energy output—renewable or not. For example, everyday people like me can already send as many emails as we want to anyone in the world for a whopping $0, instantly. I believe the transfer of money will begin to converge with how efficient our transfer of information is.

Additionally, I envision a large portion of our population will someday be using crypto for their micro-transactions and daily payments. For this reason, crypto needs to at least match the user experience of using existing centralized payment networks (PayPal, Venmo, Zelle) or, ideally, be better.

This is why I hold, and try to wherever I can, use Nano. While Nano still has its flaws and many love to point out some of its past issues, Nano is at bleeding edge of making money as efficient as possible. In an ideal world, it literally does not get better than completely feeless and instant transactions; this is without even mentioning it’s energy efficiency and decentralization game theory. If I find something better that matches Nano’s user experience, I would love to hop aboard—but so far I have not found anything better. Also, many people love to say, “well why not just use ETH after EIP-1559 comes out, or Solana, or IOTA?” Well, in my opinion, I think it’s absolutely imperative that a monetary protocol focusing on the transfer of value does not have multiple demand curves. By this I mean that every additional feature or use of a network will, in the long run, make transferring value less efficient. If a protocol can be used for smart contracts or DeFi, then the network will increasingly become bogged down by those uses and slow down pure money transfers.

Finally, if we can achieve these requirements on a base layer of a protocol, why we would not use that over a 2nd layer? In my opinion, 2nd layer solutions will inevitably lead to custodial solutions and synthetic crypto—exactly what we are trying to get away from. Time will tell if Nano is the one that will eventually be the de-facto internet money protocol, but I strongly believe SOME crypto that meets these similar features will eventually be used by millions, hopefully billions, of everyday people in the future.

Yes, I hold Nano and yes, more people buying Nano directly helps my investment in it. Do your own research.

Edit: I also realized that governments need to allow crypto payments as non-taxable events. Shouldn’t need to report capital gains when I buy something with a crypto.


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