Hello, my name is Alex Agut , and I am one of the co-founders of HandCash , the Bitcoin Cash wallet with contactless payments. This will be my first (of many) post at Yours.org, and I'm going to give you my personal opinion on how Bitcoin Cash could reach mainstream adoption.

First of all, most of you don't know anything about me or my background. I consider myself a product designer and a marketeer, as those are the two main areas I've studied and applied over the years through my professional life - both as an entrepreneur and as an employee.

Particularly, I've been very interested in branding and perception the last couple of years, mainly because I came to a point where I couldn't bear how irrational and impulsive most of our clients or users seemed to be. I became very frustrated about this situation, so I started to educate myself into the subject of perception, and how it relates to branding, marketing and product design. Suddenly, it all began to make sense.

A couple of my favorite lines on the subject I often recall are: "People are irrational all the time" and "Benefit from concepts the prospect already knows to ease the way."

If you have to educate the user, you've already failed . Talking to them as if they were stupid doesn't work either. The key, in my experience, is using concepts and words familiar to the user. Do you know how the first cars were marketed? "A horseless carriage" . It was brilliant. They didn't need to explain it had an engine, or that it ran on gas.

A simple idea related to familiar terms makes people assimilate new concepts way faster and easier.

In regards to Bitcoin, this community has struggled big time during years in the hard task that is positioning a new idea into people's minds. A concept so simple and powerful that would make everyone interested. And here is where the problem comes.

In the absence of a solid study on this subject, we settled for the default answer . If we are "electronic cash", obviously the goal should be "merchant adoption, duh!". I beg to differ.

You see, and this is only my humble opinion on the subject, when our objective is "merchant adoption", there's an implicit message to all developers and entrepreneurs: "we need more payment systems" or "we need to become an alternative payment system."

And that, by itself, is not negative or misleading, but it is an incomplete analysis of the situation.

In marketing, one of the most powerful terms, coined by Al Ries and Jack Trout decades ago, is "positioning".

Positioning refers to the place that a brand occupies in the mind of the customer and how it is distinguished from products from competitors.

Positioning works by associating brands to ideas or categories of products. When we confine Bitcoin as a payment system, we are limiting it to be a small player in the category ladder crowned by VISA, Master Card, PayPal, Skrill, etc. We need to crown our own ladder.

And as a payment system, it is probably the most difficult one to use or to understand. High volatility, very complicated terminology and the fact that you have to "buy them" in an exchange, without any knowledge on if it is or isn't a good moment to buy... that's a recipe for disaster. Adoption CANNOT happen with this strategy.