Discuss!
Education
Not many understand much about what money is
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People generally don't understand how the monetary fiat system work. On top of that, most people don't really care because either it's too much to learn/understand or they just straight up still have confidence in the government/banks to handle money at that level.
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Money is just data it's a fact most don't accept
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Goods and services available (and denominated) in Bitcoin.
There is no lack of people holding Bitcoin. It's a demand bottleneck, not a supply bottleneck.
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There is a lack of people holding, though. Best estimates are around 100M (~1% of world pop.) people holding bitcoin. The amount with any substantial holdings is probably much less.
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Normal people aren’t going to hold it if they can’t use it
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Yeah but how many of these 100m (according to you) actually use it as a currency? Barely anybody
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I agree, barely anybody. So it's not a demand bottleneck, it's a supply. Supply being the number of holders with any significant amount that it's worth it to spend. If you're living on anything less than a personal bitcoin standard, it's probably not worth spending your corn as your a pure accumulator.
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Time.
It could take 20 or 30 years for the true bitcoinised world we all envisage to take shape. It’s taken 13 years to get from 0 to ~1% and I still envisage it’ll take another 13 years to get from 1% to 10% of the entire economy. I think we need to encourage patience as that’d be 2035.
The way I see it:
  • We need time to entice developers and tech teams to build out the tools of the new internet.
  • We need time for the masses to see the flaws in our current system & leadership and seek refuge in satoshis.
  • We need time for a hopeful & motivated generation to steer us out of this downcycle.
  • We need time for the institutions, markets & ‘stores of value’ people rely on today to further decay.
  • We need time to expand the energy grids around this new asset & lay the capacity for the growth of civilisation for the next 100 years
  • We need time for game theory gravity to take hold.
As we know, Bitcoin is a truth machine. This will be recognised by most over the course of the next decade. All else has unstable foundations.
Until then… tick tock, next block.
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Wallet UX and onboarding.
Self-custody is a total nightmare for a layman and custodial solutions are either scary to those who have been burned or the BTC media portrays them as pure evil. Mainstream media gives no real detail on any of this as they are stuck on the "crime" and "ESG" talk-tracks.
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Taxes
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And that's exactly why those who are in power did it.
They know taxing something to death is effective in slowing it down.
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In my country it isn't taxed to death - it's just a bureaucratic nightmare or going into illegality
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Same thing.
When your rulers make something difficult for you, it is usually not to protect YOU but to protect THEIR POWER. :)
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I'm sure the majors are going to get called out, but I think a part of the problem is the community's marketing of three features simultaneously.
  1. privacy
  2. self-sovereignty
  3. hard-money
The mases don't care about any of these three things, but I'd wager privacy is the least cared about.
Think about it, rhetorically.
  1. How many people do you know bitch about google spying on them? Odd one or two. They don't really, they just love to search.
  2. How many people do you know bitch about their government's control over their finances? A bit more, who likes tax? Nobody, but every shuts up and pays. Some even defend it as necessary.
  3. How many people do you know bitch about any kind of inflation? Definitely this is the most popular of the three things.
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Volatility.
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In the US, trust in the current system and lack of technical insight. Seems like most people don’t understand what’s going wrong with the dollar, even with current inflation. Besides, it’s a truly radical thing to say the dollar is not only going to collapse, but fall behind a specific cryptocurrency. Also seems like people don’t have the technical understanding to really see the full gravity of what bitcoin is. Immutable information is a miraculous innovation, but most people can’t wrap their head around that or why it matters.
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Not just the US. :)
The average person is too busy with the Work grind to have enough mental energy left to analyse WHAT or WHY they are doing what they are doing.
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Lack of education in foreign languages, especially. A large number of young people in places like Nigeria and India (the future most populous countries in the world) do not speak fluent English. This is changing, of course, as internet and education spreads. However, we do need a bigger focus on resources in local Indian and African languages. People I know don't speak a word of English and it's difficult to talk about these concepts when most resources are in English.
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In the U.S., ... classification of bitcoin as property. Thus spending bitcoin is a taxable event and capital gains may be owed. Therefore, many would rather just not use bitcoin for spending.
Otherwise, there needs to be the ability to earn in bitcoin. Right now, workers need to ask (or insist) to receive some (or all) of their pay in bitcoin. There are just a tiny fraction of organizations that pay in bitcoin, today. So that's one component. The other is that there are few ways like SN, which a person can provide some value and then obtain some bitcoin. When people earn in bitcoin, then they will spend in bitcoin.
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Where I’m from, (🇳🇬), the government outrightly has tried to villianise bitcoin… so many people remain misinformed & uneducated on what bitcoin really is and until there’s a real understanding adoption out here would be slow.
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there is not one answer for all. The factors depend on where you live and your circumstances
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I think it depends on the LSM
  • In high LSM, they don't need bitcoin, they're already winning in the fiat game
  • middle LSM - they still have so much trust in institutions and dont want to "risk" what they have even though they losing it slowly the gradual losses are rationalised by one or other media narrative
  • Low LSM either haven't heard of it, or they don't have disposable income to put into it
Adoption is growing, among a stubborn minority who have disposable income, have lost faith in institutions and fiat money and as that minority grows, the rest will have no choice but to follow as they gobble up more of the worlds resources or rather perceived claims on them as bitcoin continues to monetise and suck the monetary premium out of other softer stores of value
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Good education. Most of the people have no idea about bitcoin, money, economy, how things works. But also are too lazy to read/watch/learn new stuff. So they are like hamsters in a wheel cage.
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Ignorance.
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Based on the places I've been to and to most people I've talked to (those that don't use/have bitcoin), I would say the lack of merchants that accept it or situations where using it is a "no-brainer".
For them bitcoin is just another investment/gamble.
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First and foremost it's understanding of the problems only Bitcoin solves, and how the corrupt Fiat system works against regular people. People in countries with high inflation tend to learn this faster, and now inflation has come to the West as well, in a major way...
Necessity is the key, as people will need a simple way to not lose their purchasing power and savings...
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I think that people are still scared by the short term volatility in terms of fiat. It will take time to put that fear to rest. I think that once people start seeing that over long periods of time, Bitcoin retains and gains value, adoption will start to surge. I like to tell people that no one has lost purchasing power if they held for at least 4 years.
Its clearly a store of value at this point in time, but a lot of people haven't realized it yet. I'd give it at least two more halvings. Individuals, businesses, and organizations will start locking away bitcoin as a long term savings strategy. Then you'll start seeing large purchases being made regularly in Bitcoin, like cars and houses. For medium sized to small purchases, fiat will still be the most popular. However, I think that value will be sent over Bitcoin rails in a short amount of time.
Large purchases in Bitcoin and smaller purchases in fiat sent over Bitcoin rails will be the standard for a while.
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shitcoinery. it creates a state of flux in the space. its like having 10 internets. one never really gets ahead beause people on the sidelines dont know which one to pick and just stays out. but who knows
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  1. Страх.
  2. Лень.
  3. Вера. LN победит страх и лень. Неверие поломает только время.
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LN был сделан для обучения верующих
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Gonna go with everyone and say education and that people are too lazy to learn money all over again adults don't being like told that they are wrong especially if they have a degree or certificate...makes no sense to people that have alot of dollars and I ask them what if all those dollars become worthless...None can ever even imagine that world...however it is in the realm of possibilities...in this case whats going to have to happen is their faces are going to have to get melted off for them to understand true value its going to be brutal...
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Personally I think there are two main barriers:
Pride.- Hard to accept for arrogant people they hadn't had such an idea, hard to accept for arrogant people anyone can tell them about Bitcoin, unless they think you are at their level which is not quite the case in the Bitcoin space; and eventually arrogant people can't accept you have bought cheaper than them, hence they simply don't buy.
Laziness.- People simply doesn't want to make the intellectual effort to understand Bitcoin even at a basic level. That's it.
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-Knowledge -Politicians -News and their corporation behind -Fear of change (noone really wants to change the system cause they have children/house to pay....) -Btc is a new approach (Private key, buy on exchange/peer to peer/ATM....) where older people do not want learn/ hard to understand
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We need more on/off ramps that don't require KYC. More apps like Robosats, Bisq etc where we can onboard more users quickly.
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Non-KYC and quick onboarding generally don't do hand in hand though
Understanding
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In the Bitcoin timeline there are different obstacles to take and there is not one but many steps that need to happen for broader and broader adoption. Some of them can be influenced by individuals, some of them require group effort and some of them are done by the invisible hand and just take time.
Lets have a look at the white paper, it says: "Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments."
I always wondered why people are so hyped by nation state, and classic commerce aboption... if were honest: What is the actual advantage of bitcoin in paying for groceries in the supermarket as opposed to physical cash? It is the INTERNET where Bitcoin is the strongest. On Bitcoin meet ups we tend to celebrate when we pay for our beer with Bitcoin but in the rest of the world a payment is always a secondary issue, something that happens "on the side". This will never change. Hyperbitcoinisation will be, apart from the face melting price action, the most boring thing ever.
My thesis is that, as of now, one of the biggest problems is the DX (developer experience) as a web developer with the lightning network. Payments and auth with the lightning network have to become the most natural thing on the web first and then we can talk about "brick and mortar". For this to happen we need to make the libraries and the workflows for the lightning network much more intuitive and easier to use. Also, the smart devs need to come up with accessible patterns on how to facilitate payments do that the bulk of the midwit devs, that make up most of the workforce, can start adopting.
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The utopian, left-headed legislators will be and is currently one of the barriers America is facing as a barrier.
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Public usability
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Define "adoption"
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Willing to learn, to put in the work needed to understand bitcoin and how it will become the next monetary system
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Use. It's ready right now, as it has been for years. Use it. Insist on being paid for your services/sells in BTC/crypto. Bitcoin needs an economy. Pizza, Alpaca socks started us off - today not so much is denominated in BTC / creators in this space should accept payment of it for it, not for the conversion that follows. So barrier to Bitcoin: knowing what it is & the fact that we could build our own economy with it people..
2 big ones:
  1. UX/UI - Most people don't care about the settlement rails running in the background. They just need the transaction to work predictably. It still blows my mind that more cross border transaction for people working out of country and sending money home don't happen over these systems. This hints at the next one. 2) Easy to use anon on/off ramps.
Honestly, the biggest barrier is time. Bitcoin is inevitable, I just hope I'm still around to see the beauty that it will create in this world.
stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.