I’m interested in helping build out a sort of educational onboarding community project (for simplicity sake I will refer to it as The Onboarding Project, or TOP) for non crypto people. I think POH is a good project to focus on introducing people to because it is low risk, gets people directly into the decentralized ecosystem (rather than the middleman CEX stuff), and sets a great tone for what crypto can do to improve the social infrastructure and take better care of humanity as a whole.
I’m going to be researching what kind of barriers currently exist over the following weeks but figure it would be foolish not to open the discussion up to the folks involved in it. So far this is some of what I’m seeing at a high level:
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Gas fees are prohibitive for many users. I see a bit of talk about L2, and of course The Merge will help. Not sure a timeline for L2 or what capacity that would actually be utilized. The Merge appears to have been delayed again.
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Complexity of signing up (particularly for non crypto folk) is a barrier that would be in part resolved by TOP. I’ve tried to submit a profile a few times and never made it all the way, but didn’t try super hard because it’s clear things are still evolving a fair amount. I’d like to get a better understanding of the current steps required and what is being worked on to make things simpler (if anything).
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The deposit is fairly pricey which might be something in the scope of TOP to provide with the right design.
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I’ve seen a little bit of discussion about some perverse incentive problems with the deposit and vouching process. I assume there is at least a reasonable amount of awareness in the POH and Kleros communities of the problems but have not seen or read much.
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I’m not seeing anything about account recovery or private key backup in the forum but I feel like I’ve seen it crop up somewhere. I think this is probably one of the biggest hurdles to mainstream adoption and I know there are minds working on it, but no idea how close any solutions are to implementation.
I’m sure there are other barriers I’m missing but that’s a start. Curious to hear the communities thoughts. As I evolve my own understanding of this I will continue to update this post.
Cheers!