Simplifying Vertcoin (and wallet)I thought I would repost this here from the Vertcoin Reddit thread.
Hi all,
If you are invested in crypto-currencies, you will already have an understanding to how this 'virtual' currency can hold a intrinsic value in comparison to 'real' money. You will also understand (at least in principle) the major benefits that this form of currency has over FIAT money and the current disadvantages and security concerns involving crypto-currency.
You will also have an understanding of how to convert you money through exchanges to buy the currency you want. The main issue with this is that a 'layman' person in the real world does not want the complication of having to go through depositing money, finding the best rate on the exchange, transferring that money from the exchange wallet and then finally placing the money into a 'virtual' wallet. All this is multiple steps and multiple points of potential mistakes that people just don't want the hassle of.
What if we (Vertcoin) start to simplify the world of crypto-currency to a point where anyone of your family members can understand and start using this currency in a very short time frame?
There are several barriers for entry for crypto-currencies to the major population at present:
-The ability to buy and sell to and from FIAT currency
-The instability of the market and resolving fluctuations
-The limited understanding of the processes, technologies and operations of all crypto-currencies from a layman point of view
-The ability to pay for products/services via crypto-currency
I am going to focus on the following two as the other barriers have already been looked at:
-The ability to buy and sell to and from FIAT currency
-The limited understanding of the processes, technologies and operations of all crypto-currencies from a layman point of view
One of the first major steps is to simplify the process of exchanges. New features need to be added to the Vertcoin-qt wallet to simplify the buying, selling, mining and general operation of the currency.
There should be a tab on Vertcoin.qt that enables customers to buy from the wallet, there should just be one figure which displays the 'top buy bid' from an exchange to enable immediate transactions. (Why isn't there an exchange built into vertcoin.qt that utilises P2P to remove the need of centralised exchanges?) This way people do not need to sign up to a separate exchange, rely on trust of that company (mtGox?) and learn the way of the buying and selling on an exchange.
The next part is mining; when we at Vertcoin are asking people to move away from centralised mining pool and on to P2P; we should integrate this feature into the Vertcoin wallet client and reduce the steps of setting up P2P pools. Just think of window in the software that has a version of BAMT that had pre configured mining settings for GPU's and can show trends of the mining information, can auto select P2P pools based on % of pool hash rate and select the lowest fee P2P pools.
The ability to add cold storage private keys to the wallet should be simplified. There should be a button on the UI to allow this. There also should be a option to generate cold storage wallets for users ( I understand this is hard without security issues); it could launch a version of chrome OS and a pre configure HTML page to generate them.
There should be an auto-backup feature to Dropbox or Google drive if the file is encrypted.
I would like to get the discussion going on how we can improve the Vertcoin qt software and simplify the whole process of using crypto-currencies without the use of centralised companies.
Leigh.
