Very excited to share my first slogging story.
This Slack discussion by Utsav Jaiswal, Andrew Levine, Golda Velez, Sidra, Sadia Mehmood and yours truly occurred in slogging's official #general channel, and has been edited for readability.
Shahmeer Khan
In 2021, what do you think is the single most important problem that blockchain community should be working on? Utsav Jaiswal
tl;dr - True Decentralization.We gotta move away from the 'transaction on-chain but database off-chain' models under the excuse of 'it'll be too slow'. Build better systems, efficient systems.
Andrew Levine
For us it boils down to developer friendliness. Any competent developer should be able to integrate blockchain technology into their application. The key to accomplishing that is robust multi-language support, which is wholly absent from existing platforms despite the advent of WASM. Golda Velez
Getting work to unbanked developers.You have a huge community of very smart young devs in Venezuela, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt and other countries where traditional companies won't hire them. They already use blockchain. This is your core growth community. Put jobs out there and build a vibrant ecosystem of paid devs solving local problems using blockchain.
Golda Velez
You might have to also fund startups solving local problems in those countries, that have a long term focus. Sidra
Adoption of blockchain regulations and standardization. We saw initial releases of ISO standards for blockchain and distributed ledger technologies last year. It’s still a work in progress.https://www.iso.org/committee/6266604.html
Sidra
Golda Velez, I agree with you. There is a need for general awareness among the government/decision-makers in these countries as well. 🙂 Sadia Mehmood
Identity theft has always been an issue and more so amid global pandemic. Number of scams have risen during COVID. Criminals can go above and beyond in their tactics to commit crimes, therefore ID theft is considered one of the real world problems and I think blockchain can provide solutions to remediate this issue. Due to its decentralized nature, no one can mess around with your information. Additionally, public and private keys make things easier too. I think Blockchain should come up with more identity management solutions to address ID theft concerns. Andrew Levine
Disagree strongly. Public and private keys certainly do not make things "easier." They are absolutely a critical component of the ultimate solution to this problem. Blockchains can provide a private key infrastructure that organizes data permissions, but one of the very reasons they aren't currently used for this purpose (in addition to design errors in existing protocols) is that it is so difficult to incorporate these features into applications and so difficult for end users to understand and access these features. Golda Velez
Sidra yes, a contact of mine in Bangladesh said someone he knew was recently arrested for bitcoin mining. So he is afraid to even work in blockchain field (why I didn't include Bangladesh in the list) Shahmeer Khan
Thanks everyone for your suggestions. Here are some technical ones that I think needs to be resolved: immaturity (still slow and cumbersome), lack of scalability, lack of interoperability, difficult integration with legacy systems, and complexity.