Developers* have two conflicting problems or tasks.
- Make bitcoin accessible to general public, accepted by common merchants (not just the geeky ones) and tolerated/reasonably regulated by authorities (by regulated I mean for example that written contract can be denominated in BTC, verified by and enforced by court).
- Watch very carefully that core principles of bitcoin remain unchanged.
I do not remember times at this forum in 2011 or earlier, my experience with bitcoins is about half a year, but the ones who do, the ones who actually spoke with Satoshi (him/her/it)self, the one who have been with bitcoins from the beginning surely feel change in the community which make the second point more and more difficult. There are more and more scammers. There more and more "uneducated users" pouring in. I mean the classical pattern when new user comes in an after few days (maybe hours)
discovers fundamental flaw in the bitcoin and how it can be
made right. Even after informing the people, there is shifting of the idea about what bitcoin should do.
In the future if bitcoin gets
general adoption by common people, we can expect opinions prevalent among general population. That means much more pressure about: Early adopters are
unfairly rewarded. , There
should be some inflation/demurrage. Hoarding and speculation should be discouraged/complicated/banned. There has to be some central authority(authorities), reversible transactions, mechanism for saving people from their mistakes and stupidity and mechanism for punishing the ones
taking advantage and making profit of such mistakes. There will be enormous pressure to erode core principles of bitcoin (caped supply, decentralization, irreversible transactions). Also much more nonsense about mining damaging the environment/wasting energy, endangering national security and financial stability, etc. is to be expected.
I think that developers should be more biased towards observing second problem. Because this way bitcoin can prove that (or whether) it is superior to existing fiat and altcoins solutions. Well, not superior everywhere but somewhere. There are situations altcoins will address better, there are and will be situations where cash, gold and even fiat money or PayPal will do better than bitcoins. We should not try to occupy and dominate all niches with bitcoins, we should not try to adapt it to every situation and common taste. Let the bitcoin find its own audience and uses according to what it is.
Current problems to be solved in my opinion are: transaction fees and way to implement microtransactions/colored coins. Transparent way of biding for transaction space. Question about maximal block size. And of course protocol specification including some "almost impossible to change" behavior. For experiments and alternatives there are altcoins.
* - I know "we all are developers" situation. But by developers I mean core developers who actually understand the code, made changes and development in the past, and are able to push such changes (either because they are trusted and reasonable or because it has become a custom to follow them).
