Photo by Dimitar Belchev on Unsplash

Mass adoption of Cryptocurrency is a mirage without real use cases and education of the both cryptocurrency users and the general uninformed public.

Ever since the invention of Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain technology, thousands of cryptocurrencies projects thanks to — Ethereum — has popped up promising long awaited solutions to economic and technical problems. The media played its part as a hype machine supersizing the promises of these projects allowing dumb retail money to flow in to buy the over promised tokens/coins while the founders, early investors sell off for fiat. That has been the industry pattern since the massive ROI bitcoin has had over the years, nobody wants to miss out anymore — FOMO (fear of missing out) as it’s commonly referred to in the crypto community.

Several crypto projects who promised the moon has been inactive without a single line of code published in a very long time, a lot of forks and arguments across crypto communities about the fastest chain, the true chain, the most secured chain while the real problem is being overlooked NO ONE IS USING ALL THESE CRYPTOCURRENCIES FOR REAL TIME PURCHASES EXCEPT NERDS AND GEEKS LIKE YOU AND I!!

WAS THIS WHAT SATOSHI NAKAMOTO ENVISIONED?

Mass adoption can only be achieved through:

Education: Ignorance they say is the best tool to keep the population in order. The public has to know how their financial systems work, the history and evolution of money, the current economic situation, what are cryptocurrencies, why they need cryptocurrency, what values they would be getting from ditching fiat and adopting cryptocurrency, where they can spend their cryptocurrencies,what other things can cryptocurrency do to make their day to day life much more convenient? The truth is cryptocurrency can’t be explained to an average person in 5 mins, that’s why people require indepth and consistent learning.

Check out this simple course for a head start.

2. Real life use cases: There are 3 key components important to drive use cases of cryptocurrencies :

Usability

This involves the process of being able to exchange your cryptocurrency for goods and services e.g food, clothing, rent, electricity bills, transport, online shopping etc. Everyone in the world depends on these basic needs to survive, imagine a world where all these are paid for with cryptocurrencies and other utilities such as smart contracts for legal entities & online betting, cloud data storage without violation of privacy and so much more.

Yeah it’s not coming soon and we are a long way from that because most of the goods & products manufacturer,merchants, service providers don’t accept cryptocurrencies possibly because they don’t understand how it works or never heard of it (I guess we have a lot of work to do here). Certain crypto projects like Dash have embarked on merchant adoption campaigns where they engage with merchants & service providers to teach them about cryptocurrencies, how they can start receiving it as a means of payment and liquidate for native fiat currency at least till crypto becomes its own off ramp.

Speed

At retail points when exchange of values is about to take place, it requires about 10 seconds to pull out cash from your wallet and hand it over to the receiver or in the case of Credit/debit cards 3 mins max. Cryptocurrencies has to match up or beat those speed without chances of transaction reversal (as seen in certain cryptocurrencies) for good user experiences. There are various cryptocurrencies with amazing speed such as EOS, NANO, BOS and Dash with its instant re-spendable payments feature

Fees

It costs nothing to spend fiat currencies, cryptocurrencies with high transaction fees at not suitable for retail payments e.g paying a $1 fee for a $2 cone of ice cream is outrageous. The fees has to be super cheap!! A Dash transaction costs less than 0.01$, you could literally do over a 100 transactions before you spend $1 on fees

Nigeria is one of the top countries with highest google search for Bitcoin, with an amazing >90 million internet users majority of whom are youths. There have been several cryptocurrency education and use campaigns in the country front-headed by several organizations like cryptotvplus running campus meetups and Dash Nigeria, promoting the use and adoption of Dash in Nigeria through user education, Merchant adoption, Integrations into ecommerce stores, crypto to fiat exchanges, industry events attendance, partnerships and so on.

It doesn’t matter how sophisticated your tech is, if no one is using it you have failed.

Change is slow, always has been always will be…. Adoption has to be strategic and steady, we wish every one out there promoting and educating the public about cryptocurrency & blockchain — You’re the heroes that wears no cape!!

Ciao! May the sats be with you..