Bitcoin Forum

WHat is missing in the Bitcoin EcoSystem?
Why hasn't it blown up yet?
It is still just a Speculation tool, albeit I think a good one.

SO far there is basically nothing that RELIES on Blockchain technology, if the technology disappeared tomorrow - the world would hardly change.
Where are the communities/groups with their activities that depend on Bitocin?

I'm sure most of the people on this Website are hopeful and can see some potential in Bitcoin, what are your thoughts on what is holding this technology back from having a greater impact on society?
And what are your thoughts on what steps can be taken to navigate this?
Is there a crucial part missing from the Bitcoin EcoSystem that needs to be made/created for the technology to have impact?

Your thoughts are much appretiated.....

More or less almost the entire bitcoin ecosystem is quite good and has got almost every necessary things. As quoted Blockchain technology won't get vanished, little by little every one were adopting Blockchain technology into their business and in community activities. With the potential of the technology bitcoin have reached high, same will happen with the users preferring it as the earliest.

I think that was is missing is the realisation that the blockchain is just a file system. The distibuted ledger and other bits are specified in the Core software, and not the blockchain structure. I've seen more rubbish posted around the net about "The Blockchain" than almost anything else.

It would be good if the public could be made aware of the fact that Bitcoin really is different.

Simplicity. If we want to target both the young and the old people then simplicity should be the way to go. I and almost everyone of the forums understand how bitcoin works but no one can denies the fact that when someone new to the community would like to know more about bitcoin or understand how bitcoin works , he will definitely find it hard at the beginning . (I'm speaking about people with no programming or cryptography knowledge at all). I believe that the majority of people give up while trying to understand what bitcoin is really about and how It actually works.

I know that bitcoin is based on algorithms and stuff but I guess while explaining to someone else , we could explain it better (in a simpler way then we are doing it now) .

The media is another problem , where all they do is targeting bitcoin on how It's being used on drug dealing and funding terrorism . If you think that doesn't affect then you are wrong. The sooner they stop with their nonsense , the better it is.

The blockchain is just a tool to make Bitcoin possible as a decentralized currency. Unlike OP portrays it, the true killer application of the blockchain is Bitcoin, not any secondary services that might use the blockchain as well. These are perfectly expendable. in fact, a blockchain is a fairly inefficient structure for many of the services some startups are trying to push towards it.

What's missing in the bitcoin ecosystem are companies from the primary economic sector that offer their products for Bitcoin and B2B Bitcoin trade. We have a lot of service offerings for Bitcoin, but what we are largely missing are essential goods like food products. For Bitcoin to be successful as a currency independent from fiat trash money, we need a closed loop economy, where people can buy all their daily necessities using Bitcoin only. That would make Bitcoin remittances a much larger success as well, because they will become incredibly cheap as recipients don't need to convert their coins to fiat.

ya.ya.yo!

Bitcoin ATMs.

Getting BTC should be as easy as going to the bank or ATM. Unfortunately here in the U.S. the big banks have made it almost impossible to become a legal "money transmitter".  This is being worked on, but can't come fast enough for me.  >:(  If bitcoin could be bought at an ATM then I think POS adoption would explode.

I think what would've made Bitcoin better would have been popularity. Although we as a community are growing faster and faster with every day passing by, we are less popular than we should have been in 8 years since the release. The $1,2k price should have also helped a lot, especially because it's a HUGE price for a virtual currency and people really paid for it.

so.. you think adoption is easy to achieve?
bitcoin is growing, but that will not happen from day to night.

yayayo, I do agree with your view of Bitcoin being the 'first killer app' and didn't mean to emphasis the word 'Blockchain' in my original post. Bitcoin has the network, the time & money invested - it's more than just a nifty piece of software.

RodeX, as you pointed out, limited access is crippling adoption. The vision is that bitcoins are available to all, being highly transferable for any other good, commodity or currency worldwide - but that really isn't the case. I think this in itself is severely retarding the network effect which Bitcoin relies on.

many noobs think the only way to get bitcoin is to:
* run a ponzi and scam people
* raid faucets
* signature campaigns

many noobs do not see the bitcoin economy in the real world outside of this forum.
this forum has become its own culdron of inner sanctuary. where people are just stirring things within the forum. trading, advertising, speculating, etc.

we need to expand peoples minds outside of this forum. to do some real world stuff.
EG
* real jobs paid in bitcoin.
* local conferences and meetups
* merchant adoption
* user friendly wallets (NFC/username) instead of public key/QR code

bitcoin can expand in many ways but it is starting to turn into segmented boysclubs like some ganglands where there are borders and fights if one side steps into another sides line.

each town/city should have its own 'information centre' for meetups/exchanges conferences and just general info.
each town/city should have some advocates that help raise awareness and help businesses start up by finding the right people for the right roles to help the economy grow.

franky1

Am I right in thinking that you're suggesting that Bitcoin is TOO much 'on the internet', and the thing missing is the tangible, human aspect to it... a face? Isn't there enough information online to get people started with using Bitcoin?

Some of the 'real world' suggestions you made are projects that either have been made or are in the process of developing/ like the easy to use wallets ie. AitBitz and others. There's BitPay and ShapeShift for accepting payments etc.

I guess my thoughts are along the lines of... is there something else? Maybe along the lines of Steem? Steemit is a bit of a microtopia but its success seems to be more based on its merit rather than support for the ideology behind it/ or wide spread adoption of its token(s).

my thoughts are that bitcoin is too much on this forum..
its turned into a circle jerk affair. to learn bitcoin you go to this forum, to start earning bitcoin you go to this forum, yes there are other places like reddit and other services. but this forum seems to have turned too inward and only stirring its own pot.

imagine this forum like an island. instead of getting the inhabitants to go out and explore the world, they are directing new people to the island and hope they stay in the island and trade on the island.

not much has been done since id say 2015 to get people to do some real world stuff.. all the stuff i have seen in the real world of 2016 looks like the same idea's of 2012-2014. when i was highly involved to getting the message out.

i have shot down many scammers and tried to look at business idea's people come up with. but lately all i see is demotivated culdron stiring  attempts of peoples gread of just trying to make money from eachother inside these forums. instead of expanding and exciting the real world.

it just seems like things have stagnated and just turned away from a 'revolutionary currency' and just into a who's got the biggest **** 'club'

new idea's only seem to end up being scams and anything to grow utility get pushed aside unless a banker paid dev is at the lead of designing it.

yes we need more concepts and utilities and less sheep following one direction that ends up just circling itself

if you want some idea's to expand bitcoin

Drop-shipping.
   expand retail<->bitcoin
manufacturing.
   hardware wallets with NFC that take in a tx via NFC and send out via NFC a signed tx in seconds
   bitcoin novelty gifts
   list goes on
local exchanges
meetups/conferences
jobs
   real jobs paid in bitcoin

There does seem to be very little promotion of Bitcoin and absolutely no mainstream advertisement for its use.

I would like to contribute to the ecosystem in someway - My feelings are that Bitcoin needs more facilitators, more social network type platforms that link people together with extra possibilities to use our digital tokens. The idea with Bitcoin is that each individual can interact with another, with a third party - but some platform to help facilitate this 'meeting of individuals'.

- A working hypothesis and maybe there are platforms on the way?

social platforms (facepalm)
let me guess a FB group. where people need to search 'bitcoin' to find it

usually just like this forum. its where it ends up being a group if insiders talking to each other and getting outsiders to come inward.
this is usually done by noobs hearing about bitcoin and drawn into a 'social platform'. rather then the social platform reaching out.

where everyone just advertises within the group. which becomes a culdron of advertising to people who already heard about bitcoin.

we need to stop thinking about bringing people into groups but expanding bitcoin away from groups and become independent and expanding.

I am thinking along the lines of how the PayPal value transfer service became widely adopted because of the eBay platform.
And Steem has been distributed via the Steemit platform.

I get that only people already interested in Bitcoin are going to go onto a Bitcoin forum, but some other platform where the USP is more than just 'we use bitcoins' and other ways of interacting with other users is facilitated - an exchange Hub of some variety.

A platform with lots of sellers and buyers like eBay could help, but bitcoin has Openbazaar, it isn't as big as eBay. But we need to think that eBay started with few sellers and few buyers too.

There is no perfect in anything on the virtual world at first but when time goes by, feedback from the users itself will contribute in perfecting this Bitcoin's EcoSystem that you said, that's why bitcointalk is here to hear the voice of the people in what is the missing link in ways to improve Bitcoin.

bitbay / open bazaar
a better google adsense alternative

but without having to rely on LN hubs otherwise its no better then paypal/google wallet
multisig yes. but current LN concepts. no

I think everyone underestimate how far bitcoin has come. You can buy it in thousands upon thousand of places all over the world. And it is not slowing down.  Its not where evreybody wants it but it is rocking.

...

Here is what I see missing in the Bitcoin Ecosystem that I would like to see made better:

1)  More merchants accepting BTC as payment.

2)  More users like us...


To a lesser degree:

3)  Yes, Bitcoin is pretty hard to use for the general public, but I have seen all sorts of users at Bitcoin ATMs...

4)  I *believe* that the Core Developers ought to "do it right" when it comes to resolving technical issues, IMO make it easier to make important evolutional changes without programming mayhem....

in response to point 4. they need to CODE solutions. and not think about economics/price wars..
they should only think about expanding the utility via code.. and let the world decide the economics.
my main gripe is their lack of CODE to set priority/recognise priority. but put in mechanisms that push the fee forward even if there was low demand.

devs need to stop pushing an agenda and instead just stick to utility and expansion.

they really should have done some proper 'priority' coding. and not just the fee war thing they done, especially now all wallets are literally sheep following the price upwards and mining pools have to literally break away from the 'average' rule to allow in cheaper tx's just to break the constant rise.

sheep following and concentrating only on price rather than coded security is the downfall of any 'decentralised/diverse coding project'

I personally think that the only thing missing within the Bitcoin economy is actually getting it to people with simple applications that can use emails or other relatively simple IDs to send transactions. Right now not many people want to go through a whole alpha-numeric string to get their friend's wallet or whatever, and simplifying that process (and having more companies accept it) would be huge.

yep NFC seems to be the readily available tech of most retailers E-PoS systems.

a hardware wallet that sends a public key it owns. the retailer hands it the uptodate 'unspents' of those addresses along with a output address the retailer wants to receive to. then the hardware wallet automatically forms a tx, signs it internally and only sends out the signed tx to the retailer.

its a split second thing which allows hardware wallets to stay offline while making uptodate payments.

also users dont need to use, see or care about lengthy public keys as its all done unseen on a retailers e-point of sale and the hardware wallet via their NFC's. where the only thing thats 'swapped' is public data anyway

There are some problems why bitcoin not having greater impact yet.
Lack of information about bitcoin, really. How much people in the world know about bitcoin and blockchain technology? I just find out because my friend told me and some of people here knows it by accidentally (word of bitcoin on internet)
Bitcoin seems so complicated in the beginning and new adopters may think it's a scam/not real (lack of information again)
How to get it in the first place, only they who have big amount of money willing to buy (for newbies)
For us, who had known and earn bitcoin, the most problems is how to spend, not many merchants accepted bitcoin payment yet even in some places, there is no any merchant.

There are no communities or groups that depend on Bitcoin beyond the bitcoin community and the businesses directly involved with it. Considering the current climate, we're the only ones who would really care.

The biggest things holding Bitcoin back is its complexity compared to standard banking and it's lack of use around the world. If it was simpler for the common man and more wide-spread as an acceptable currency, then everything would be fine.

probably the idea of bitcoin ATM is good for those who are new into bitcoin because they can see the "hardware" instead of just "software". and it will make bitcoin be more famous. imo

the other missing thing, in my view, is bitcoin in real coin we can touch. at least there are 10 real coins. just to show to public that it is money.

1. Actually big banks and government are holding bitcoin back while trying to adopt blockchain technology with which bitcoin works.

2. Bitcoin being completely decentralized and not controlled by any companies or group of people, on what way bitcoin will advance depends much on community decision and also there are really good team of developers who are pushing regular updates for making bitcoin better.

3. Currently, most of the people concern is about the block size it seems block size should be increased to lower transaction fee and time for confirmation on transactions.

I think this idea had already been done by some online processor, e.g coins.ph.  You can send bitcoin thru your friends email just make sure the guy is also a member of coins.ph.  So that process falls under your vision if im not mistaken.

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I have to agree that the bitcoin ecosystem is missing primary companies that can offer jobs to many people and pay them with bitcoins.  There are lots of start-up companies that are born everyday, but they are more as self centered company that wants to exploit people of Bitcoin Idea.

This is something that can actually make things easier for many people, and I think at the moment there are companies working on it.
In addition, there are other applications that can contribute to the ecosystem, such as those scheduled for next year, among them lightning network and megaupload 2.0. I hope segwit is activated to allow these improvements to the Bitcoin network.

A massive popularity and usage worldwide. Using bitcoin directly is really hard these days that you have to rely in a third party site and of course its so much more difficult to use it personally or in the real world

Most bitcoin users don't have a depth understanding of it and they only know the basics like sending and receiving

Bitcoin is anonymous but buying it without giving your personal info is difficult

There is crusial part that is missing from the bitcoin ecosystem and this is the

mass advertising of bitcoin to people who doesn`t know anything about it,or don`t trust it.

Yes,btc is a specualtion tool and it`s a really good one.

I think we need to educate more people about bitcoin; many only recognize it because of its past with Silkroad. This type of approach must change if the bitcoin community wants to grow.

Bitcoin education is totally missing from the bitcoin ecosystem .people should be more educated so that it becomes more popular and the price of bitcoins goes high

Bitcoin is still very complex to use and understand which i think puts people off,  it is also very expensive now and people hate to use decimal places to represent their money,  i think we need to move to bits as quickly as possible,  i have had a few friends who think they have missed the boat because they cant afford 1btc and they wont consider buying 0.5btc.....  ::)

I think Bitcoin will take off faster, if someone distributes Bitcoin vending machines with low fees in common market places or shopping malls.

The Bitcoin ATM's are too expensive and the fees are too high. The other problem is merchant adoption and people not supporting these

merchants after they adopted Bitcoin.  >:(

Probably for me was the mass adoption, I mean what i really mean is that the government should start to recognized bitcoin as the global currency than anything else. I would love to also say to them that if you uses bitcoin you don't have to worry anymore about your currency that is far from USD if your people do invest on bitcoin then probably that huge currency rate differences can be lessen

There are several reasons why bitcoin has not blow up yet :
- Lack of information, not many people know about bitcoin, it's different in first, second, and third world countries.
- then, lack of users/adopters
- and lack of merchants accepted bitcoin
- caused, lack of market cap and liquidity.
After all, the price of bitcoin affected by supply and demand
If the price of bitcoin keep rising, how people in sec and third world countries could participate, I mean, they will thinking twice before buy it.

Don't those Darknet marketplaces rely on Bitcoin or some other form of crypto-currency? I'd think if Bitcoin and all other altcoins disappeared, it would have an impact on the online drug trade.
I'm not saying if this would be good or bad, just that in that area, it would have an impact.

Also, quite a few BTC-only gambling sites rely on Bitcoin, but this would ofc continue to exist without Bitcoin, albeit, without some of the handy functionality offered only in BTC casinos (Anonymity, instant accounts, etc.)

Can't think of some more positive examples though :p

As most users quoted I too believe that the proper way of teaching or sources to learn about the backing technology is missing from the bitcoin ecosystem. Other than this people misunderstanding about the decentralisation is also found which needs to change.

I am concerned to be honest. I see people trying to improve the code, i see a lot of mining, storing and trading. Those are all fine, but i do also see a lot of scams and criminal activity involved in Bitcoin, what is to be expected and tolerable to some degree, but i do not see many positive things. I miss essential things like the possibility to use Bitcoin in my everyday life. I miss applications using and relying on Bitcoin. I see the price going up, but i do not want Bitcoin to be just an investment. I hope this changes or some altcoin will come and make it better and take over.

Bitcoin is not receiving the attention it deserves, people are still not aware of what bitcoin is and i think that is due to the reason that there is few sites out there that teach you about bitcoin and even if there is they make it so complicated and hard so they get bored and ditch the idea, i am saying this from a personal experience , i have had a realy hard time learning about bitcoin if it was not for this forum