I've been covering and researching crypto currencies for a while now, and the main interest factor for non-technical people is mining. Proof of stake brings the idea of green processing vs the high cost of purchasing gear and electrical expenses. The million dollar question is which one is more productive and yields more value. For the sake of argument, lets say I spent $2000 building me a solid PC with 2 AMD R9 nanos, generating 4,000 Ghs for Proof of Work. Now, lets assume I took those $2000 and bought decred from an exchange and acquired 1500 DCRD. Which of the two methods would yield a better return, POW or POS. If anyone can help me answer this question or want to collaborate in building a mining calculator, I'm all in. This is the type of information, non-technical users need to have for decred to be embraced by the masses, which in turn helps the decred gain value, and everyone wins. Krypto Don't sell technology, sell the value the technology offers..
Nice questions. Mining is only break even activity most of the time, unless you can pay for electricity w/o selling & think that price will appreciate in future. Most people mine for fun & challenge. Otherwise just buy on exchange & wait for price rise. Although if price falls then you can always sell your coins & h/w to get close to even. With decred, PoS can lock your funds from days to months (147 days max) so if you want to ROI in dollars then it gets tricky as markets wont wait for your funds to be unlocked. Also if you stake from a low powered computer then its almost free so its better than mining but only if price appreciates. If price falls you have only your depreciated coins in hand.
Mining can be profitable under the right circumstances, I currently mine bitcoin with a profit, otherwise there is really no point (definitely wouldn't do it for fun). In the business world, you open a business and need to stay afloat, the day my mining rigs are no longer profitable I'm shutting them off. Coming back to Decred, we need to get the masses excited about mining, participating in the network, give them a sense of ownership of the coin and the network, but it has to be profitable for the average Joe to take that leap of faith. Bitcoin will maintain its first mover advantage because all the altcoins measure back to bitcoin, but if we can figure out how to make Decred more profitable with mining it will definitely bring the attention and momentum. my 2 cents of contribution, better yet my 2 Decreds lol
well decred mining is most profitable at the moment and by a fair margin. That was ELI5 explanation, obviously there is lot of nuance to mining.
The average joe will never mine a single decred. If that were possible you would have had 100 million airdrop participants. Lets think about this for a second. How many people who own a pc built it rather than bought it? Lets further say a smaller % of these technical people are the ones who would also be able to figure out how to set up a PC to mine crypto. Sure there would be some cross over but lets keep it simple. We already know the bar to get a mining setup running is quite high as we did not have 100 million miners on day 1. There were probably less than 5,000 and that is being generous. Network participation is not the route to go. Even if we could 100X the size of the decred user base tomorrow it would only be 500,000. A fraction of 1% of just the USA population. The way to get joe sixpack to recognize decred is for retailers everywhere to offer it as a form of payment. Once retailers and exchanges make decred easy to get the rest is simple. I think a decred debit card would go a long way towards this goal. A card or app that can be loaded with fiat or crypto then lives as crypto on card / app. This would then be used to purchase with either crypto or crypto -> fiat. Magic! With the world contemplating ZIRP and NIRP if you could also integrate PoS for card balances. Even just as the system sits now. XFR 100 coins to card /app stake 50 have 50 avail for spend. You would have a way to make interest better than most banks at this point in time. The major problem is one of the club. If you want to enter the current system you have to play by their rules. These rules are prohibitive in legality and expense to implement. To be free of these rules decred needs to be entirely separate from the fiat system only then would it be truly free.
You made some great points, especially the one about getting decred familiar with retailers and accepted as a form of payment; I'm with you a hundred percent. In my PHD research in cryptocurrencies, the second phase for the adoption of any cryptocurrency deals with making the currency commercially accessible as you described. The first phase deals with acquiring the cryptocurrency. The average non-technical Joe will be overwhelmed the moment he/she hears cryptography or any other technical term. This will make the concept of cryptocurrency hard to grasp, and delay the desire to purchase an unknown technology. The solution: Don't sell the technology, sell the value of the technology. If you talk to someone new to cryptocurrencies, before you get into the zeros and ones of hashing and crashing lol Tell them it's legal, it's secure, and they can mine(generate value) at home with their computer and you will likely gain their attention. In regards to the complexity of having them build their own mining systems and configure them properly, you are correct in that they may not be up to the challenge. This is where it gets interesting for us techies, we just opened up a new market and a demand for them to procure our services. Let's go back to 1994 for a second, HTTP was so new, very few people knew how to setup a web server and how to code an HTML page. This did not stop business from hiring individuals to do that for them because they saw value. In the business world, as long as something has value, entrepreneurs will hire the right people to implement it. My favorite line is: I can show you how to generate value while you sleep!! Referring to having mining rigs operating overnight and mining currency. If people can mine the coin at home they will surely want to spend it at some point (supply and demand), this is where phase 2 kicks-in making it commercially accessible. My research goes beyond what I just described and there are more phases. Cryptocurrencies involve many other sciences besides technology and cryptography; some other areas that come to mind: economics, psychology, sociology and marketing. Don't sell the technology, sell the value of the technology (Krypto, 2016) Krypto