Feedback that I have received from non-technical laypeople that I have brought to Tezos.

Background:

I am a longtime Bitcoin/Tezos enthusiast, and I have brought dozens of my friends and family into the crypto-currency community. I have taught about a dozen of them about Tezos, and I helped many of them to contribute to the Tezos Token Generation Event (TGE). All of them are non-technical: they usually call me when they run into problems. Here is some of the feedback that I have received from them.

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• Problem 1: allowing over-delegation is not smart. Several of them have told me that they suffer from “% full anxiety”. Human nature is that they want to delegate to the highest quality baker with the lowest fees. They want to just “set it and forget it”. One expressed concern to me that the delegation service that he chose rose from about 60% full to about 90% full in a couple of weeks. This caused him to have to constantly check to see whether his chosen baker was over-delegated or not. He has had to switch delegation services 3 times so far. Recommended solution: make delegating to a full baker impossible. Evidence that people agree that this is a problem:
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/tezos/comments/93s30l/is_there_a_mechanism_to_reject_someone_delegating/
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/tezos/comments/a6how1/do_yourself_a_favor_and_if_you_are_delegating_to/
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/tezos/comments/a1dzb4/the_problem_of_overdelegation_for_more_services/
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/tezos/comments/9wimfp/can_overdelegation_be_controlled_with_a_switch/
• Problem 2: if a non-technical person makes a recommendation on how to improve Tezos, they are often told that it is their mistake, and that there is nothing wrong with the system as it is. One of my friends told me that he made a recommendation on how to improve Tezos, and he was basically told that he was completely wrong. He felt humiliated and silenced. The Bitcoin community makes the same mistake: they drive away non-technical users by putting them down, and making them feel like idiots for stating what they see as problems. This attitude is completely wrong, especially if we want Tezos to be adopted by the vast majority of the human population that are non-technical. Dan Larimer, founder of EOS, recently did an overnight session answering questions from both technical and non-technical EOS users about their upcoming Voice platform. This is the right attitude to take: the customer is always right, and we have to be ready and willing to carefully listen to their feedback, and implement it, where possible. If we listen to and implement a majority of what our non-technical users tell us, whether we like it or not, they will choose our platform over platforms that ignore them.
• Problem 3: Our data sources are often inaccurate. One of my friends told me that he delegated to a baker because one trusted Tezos data source told him that the baker was at 95% of capacity. He wanted to delegate about 20,000 XTZ, and the source told him that the baker had about 100,000 XTZ of room left. He later discovered that the baker was already over-delegated when he visited their website. The root problem: the data on a trusted Tezos data source and the baker's website did not match. This lack of attention-to-detail leads non-technical users to lose confidence in the Tezos system as a whole. Non-technical users don’t care if it is difficult: they expect information that they receive to be accurate. If Tezos stores data in a blockchain, then they expect that all data sources are getting their data from the blockchain, so they should be 100% correct at all times. Whether you think this is right or wrong, this is what they expect. If we can’t provide this, then they will find another coin that does.

I think that if we can fix these three problems, Tezos will see a lot more adoption from non-technical users than it currently has. The fourth problem, the one that we all know about, is that Tezos is not promoted..at all. Most people have never heard about it. I educate people as much as I can, but they often get discouraged when they notice the problems that I have addressed above.

Thank you all for your time. I am proud to be a member of the Tezos community!