Toknormal, Your post above is great, but what can we do to make this understandable to the non-crypto initiated?
It doesn't necessarily work - at least as far as widespread adoption is concerned. Explaining and communicating the technical advantages can only get you so far - e.g. to the "thinkers". To get the real economy to absorb the benefits needs either financial incentives or brute force.
The WIMPS system (Windows, Icons and Pull-Down Menus) went through 3 incarnations of convincing "thinkers" before it really went mainstream. And it wasn't the same technology - or company - that ultimately did it.
[1] XEROX
invented it, [2] Apple sold it and [3] Microsoft dominated it.
The reason it got from [1] to [2] was because the boffins in Xerox managed to convince the technically literate at Apple. But the reason it got from [2] to [3] was ultimately because of the IBM monopoy's big achilles heel.
That was that they were mainframe manufacturers and couldn't re-tool fast enough to jump on the "micro" revolution. The "brute force" bit was that Bill Gates managed to get IBM to
contract him to write their OS. Thus it went from PC-DOS to MS-DOS and Microsoft went from outsider to insider overnight. That gave them the monopoly they needed to sho-horn their own GUI into the market (first Windows 3.0 in 1990 and later Windows 95) and keep the lid on Apple's technological lead.
What Must Dash do Therefore ?All industrial precedents must be studied and all possible historical lessons learned - both technological and commercial. What the 80's/90's lessons seem to say is that Dash must look for monopolies with an achilles heel which its unique advantages directly address. (These don't necessarily have to be big - they can be "mini-monopolies" or dominant interests in specific markets). In particular, it has to identify clear markets where the integrated approach trumps the technologically diverse one. With Apple it was desktop publishing and music. (In fact even Atari had a
dominant market presence in music studios for a while with etheir
GEM OS).
The obvious one for Dash is Bitpay and the POS market. Dash's instant transactions are infinitely more secure than bitcoin's and Bitpay is mass-marketing those. So the technical bit is there, it's the politics that's the unknown. It was politics that let Microsoft put their foot in the door of Apple's progress (at least at the start).
Look what's happening with Bitcoin - that's all politics as well because we now have a well funded, commercially interested party (Blockstream) that bought itself a significant chunk of the bitcoin core developer personnel. (I realise some of them are founders themselves but they're not the significant funders).
The way to get politics on your side is simply to have something that no-one else has or can easily reproduce. That can be to "own" certain markets as well just as owning certain technologies. It's a no brainer therefore that the corporate world would want to get its hands on at least some of the tiny group with commit access to bitcoin core - and that's exactly what they've been able to do.
There are many sectors I'm sure that Dash can put roots into, however large or small. Sometimes a tiny strategic presence can be as important as a large, high turnover one.
Here's one I stumbled across the other day.
This woman runs a business which secures creative work for artists and massively increases security for purchasers in terms of mitigating counterfeit copies of stuff like paintings. It appears to be a
growing business but the "digital footprint" service is centralised. She sees bitcoin as a "competitor" and is wondering how to proceed. (In fact she see blockchains in general as competitors to her business).
People like that have "achilles heels" and are desperate to address them. They are fertile ground for products and services which come along and turn their weakness into a strength. They don't need to be sold on nerdy concepts of cryptocurrency, just given a solution with minimum hassle.
I'm not saying for sure that that type of business is Dash's target market - but it may well be one of them since Dash can probably do BOTH the securing of the digital footprint and also provide an online, secure micro payment service. I'm just highlighting that example as a case where marketing and identifying your commercial strengths are more important than explaining technical details.
P.S.
Sorry to screw with your post Tok, but this was too inaccurate:
Very nice ! You're too right.
