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The original was posted on /r/nanocurrency by /u/higginsonporker on 2023-08-11 17:13:50.
In my recent attempt to pick up nano for a project idea, I've found it to be a massive overhead, I'm going to need to make a serious time, energy and pain investment to learn about blockchain and cryptography just to be able to send nano from one wallet to another, it's absurd. And I'm no noob, I've been coding for 7 years, C++, Rust, Python, Nim, JS, frontend, backend, databases, severs etc.
This is a massive issue that should be at the forefront of Nanos attention, but it seems nothing has been done in recent years to address it. I have a very specific circumstance where people are being blocked from using money, and as a result, nano became a viable option, most people are not going to have this use case, and there isn't a chance in hell anyone is going to use nano over money for their applications.
The following is from a 2019 article about blockchain in general, but it's especially relevant to nano today. Other cryptos don't need to worry about any of this because they're just hype coins, investment opportunities. Nano is actually attempting to be an alternative to money, to achieve widespread adoption and use, and to have any remote chance of achieving that, they are going to need to make it 10x easier for developers to use nano.
Taking a step back, why does blockchain need to be scalable? Nobody is using it. We’ve had one app that has challenged the limits of Ethereum, CryptoKitties, and that was short lived. I’m not saying that blockchain doesn’t have to be scalable eventually, but until we see mass adoption, it doesn’t matter. Even when all the technical problems of blockchain are solved, it won’t mean anything unless people can use it without the possibility of losing hundreds of millions of dollars. The reality is that developing on blockchain is and still will be difficult and could even be more difficult with the addition of layer 2.
Why? Because most layer 2 solutions, although addressing the three aforementioned problems, will not touch on the bigger picture of the blockchain problem for future expansion: the lack of skill by the average developer. So, this adds a fourth dilemma to the list:
• Ease of development: Removing the low-level building and moving of infrastructure that the average developer spends too much time on, rather than building features for the application to work on top of the blockchain.
At this point, to truly take advantage of the tech, you need a team with the equivalent of multiple doctorates who have backgrounds in network security, cryptography, blockchain, distributed systems, etc.
What can happen when developers without blockchain experience build on top of this technology? In 2016, DAO lost $60 million ether in an attack after a hacker found a loophole in its smart contract code. In January 2018, hackers stole $530 million worth of NEM cryptocurrency from Japanese exchange Coincheck. In November, a user of Ethereum wallet Parity discovered a bug that turned multi-signature wallets into a regular wallet address. In a panic to return the money, the user inadvertently made the wallets unusable and destroyed $150 million.
As mentioned above, even if the first three problems are solved, ease of development is the real key to mass usage. We need more focus from the blockchain community on ease of development — not just temporary bandaids, but long-term solutions.
Imagine a driver having to build their own car before they could get on the road. This is currently where blockchain is when it comes to application development. What will inevitably save many resources, including time, money and personnel, is ready-to-go, interoperable protocols for blockchain applications that take away the hard parts of development. Providing these lower level builds will make expansion into blockchain for any new company looking to incorporate the technology easier by offering the ability to have a solid foundation for their applications from the start.
This will be what truly makes blockchain adoptable and innovation endless.
