This is undoubtedly one of the most interesting coins of the year. It looks to have some great developers and is no doubt technically superb. The governance model is also beautiful and some of the proposals are eye catching.
But what the hell is the plan for adoption, besides just being an awesome coin? This critical question is absolutely ignored if not avoided from what I can tell.
I'm not asking for a plan that would replace bitcoin, but just something that's going to get it used.
Otherwise, it's a waste of a good coin, IMO.
These are not unfair concerns. Now that Decred has seen its first quarter, it's an important time to begin our review as a community and as a project. This will be done as an announcement. To answer your questions directly, the RFPs to date are set out predominantly to address issues of accessibility, whether it's access to the software and network functions through GUIs (
RFP-1,
RFP-2), access to information about network activity (
RFP-3), access to information about how to use the software and different platforms (
RFP-4), or access to Decred through PoW mining through software (
RFP-5) or PoS (
RFP-6) mining through stake pools. All of these RFPs are on-going and aim to improve the means by which users can access the software.
Once these are complete and at a reasonable level of maturity, Decred RFPs will transform to address new needs evidenced by users. You can already see that happening with work into getting much better at Decred's presentation to the outside world (
RFP-7), due to the fact that other RFPs are progressing, and exploratory work into transaction scripts such as smart contracts (
RFP-8). Another incredible milestone that most users are not aware of is dcrd is currently being synced to its upstream project (btcd). Most cryptocurrencies do not enjoy this, but with continued development, Decred gets to pull in a lot of improvements. So for example, dcrd will see a major redesign and rewrite of the database package for highly optimized read performance with consistent write performance regardless of database size, once the sync is complete (to name one of the bigger improvements).
Achievement of these milestones will lead to demos of blockchain governance, followed by actual "smooth" hard forks, and progressing community members into the project governance side. It may not be super visible at the moment, as most of the visible work goes into the code repositories, but output will eventually become more visible when some of the accessibility milestones are reached. Once that happens, Decred is one step closer to its goal of consensus-based decision-making through voting on the blockchain. It is at that point where things get really interesting when Decred is much more accessible, decentralized, and ready for wider participation.
