2017 was the year cryptocurrencies really started to go mainstream. By the end of the year, you could not turn on the TV or read a newspaper without seeing a story about Bitcoin. While the blockchain is a revolutionary technology, cryptocurrencies have so far not lived up to the hype. Mainstream knowledge of cryptocurrencies is here, but mainstream use in day-to-day transactions has not yet happened.

Let’s look at 3 reasons why.

Random alphanumeric or hexadecimal addresses

The first problem users have to deal with in using cryptocurrencies is the address! To the average user, cryptocurrency addresses are a string or random alphanumeric characters. Bitcoin addresses look like this: 1MufAiS5KxYstVHDmrEM8fyfRNohfiNrMT, while Ethereum addresses look like this: 0xb794f5ea0ba39494ce839613fffba74279579268. These addresses might seem normal to anyone who has been using cryptocurrencies for some time, but to someone new to crypto, there’s nothing normal about them. The addresses are a cryptographic hash, which is a relic of cryptocurrencies being created by computer programmers and cryptographers.

It is practically impossible to find someone to transact with, without going through the address exchange ritual crypto users have come to accept. This creates friction which is one hurdle in the way of non-techy crypto adopters.

Lack of crypto-friendly solutions for merchants

The next time you are purchasing an item at a store or restaurant, think of this: Is it easier to pay with debit, credit card or mobile payment than it would be to do the transaction in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency? For most users, the answer would be “yes”. The user would have to go through the address ritual all over again. High transaction fees and slow transaction speeds are also issues users have to deal with.

On the merchant side, how easy would it be to start accepting cryptocurrency payments for goods and services? Simply giving merchants an address that accepts cryptocurrency payments is not a solution to this problem. Merchants can not easily manage cryptocurrency payments or easily integrate them with their existing payment systems.

No contextual information around transactions

Payments have always had a way to incorporate some information or metadata around the payment. For example, when a cheque is written, there is a line for a memo that states what the cheque is for. In today’s online or mobile payments systems, there is usually a way to attach a note to a payment. In cryptocurrencies today, there is no easy way to add any form of contextual information to transactions. When a user or merchant receives a payment, they can not tell who it came from, what the payment is for, or any other contextual information. If a merchant received five cryptocurrency payments from five different customers, there would be no way to know which customer or order to attribute each payment to. Thus, cryptocurrencies are practically unusable for merchants in their current form.

What do you think are the main problems slowing the rate of cryptocurrency mass adoption?

For cryptocurrency to be more globally accessible, these pressing problems need to be solved.

In a future post, I will cover how exactly these problems can be solved and how solving them will be the catalyst for mass user adoption of cryptocurrency.