I think that the GUI is a bigger deal than what a lot of people like to admit. I think it is something that has consistently made it "difficult" for the average/casual user to easily enter the Monero world and you never want to make it hard for your "customers" to buy. However with that said, it may not create as big a bang as it should right out of the gates because most of the people involved at this point have made accommodations for it and either keep their Monero on an exchange(s) or MyMonero or learned simple wallet and these people will gladly use it but they are already "in".  Unfortunately it will only be a relatively small number of people who will immediately jump in and start buying for the first time and using the new wallet. The bigger gains will come over the next few months and weeks as new people from the DMs, people newly introduced to Monero and those who have been waiting specifically for it because in their mind we're like the "only" ones without a gui wallet and now see more value and legitimacy in the project.

To some Monero may look bad because there aren't those bells and whistles so of course the devs are "incompetent" because every coin had a shiny new wallet when it first came out... "how hard can it be?".  Now, I understand there is a lot more going on here than just writing another wrapper or grabbing a complete wallet codebase and changing the captions, logo and some text and BANG, you've got a wallet. But the average person doesn't know, understand or care and we need to start thinking about how we can do a better job of relating to those people instead of just the "technophiles" which we seem to attract because of the great technology we have.

We have fantastic devs on this project, some great contributors who have provided natural leadership and now that most of the key underpinnings of this project are in place or in progress, we need to bring those people with money to spend and not a lot of technical savvy or maybe just no desire to deal with a console app into the fold, make it easy to buy, hold, send, convert to btc,make payments, do some mining, etc... do it right and they will help to push Monero into a place of prominence and drive the market cap to a point that makes it even more palatable to more industries to use without all the volatility.

Sorry for running on about this but as I said, in the grand scheme of moving Monero from an "also ran" to a leader in the ecash space I believe this is critical!

CTTE

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I mean, when the GUI is out, it is ready for non-ponies and non-fairies (read: normal people) unlike we are apparently. The potential markets are huge and the price potential is even higher because the wealthy bagholders will not bother to sell too cheap if ever.