Very excited to share my first slogging story. This Slack discussion by , , , Sidra, and yours truly occurred in , and has been edited for readability. Utsav Jaiswal Andrew Levine Golda Velez Sadia Mehmood slogging's official #general channel In 2021, what do you think is the single most important problem that blockchain community should be working on? Shahmeer Khan Jan 28, 2021, 1:25 PM 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. Utsav Jaiswal Jan 28, 2021, 1:31 PM 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. Andrew Levine Jan 28, 2021, 3:09 PM 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 Jan 28, 2021, 5:22 PM You might have to also fund startups solving local problems in those countries, that have a long term focus. Golda Velez Jan 28, 2021, 5:23 PM 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. Sidra Jan 29, 2021, 5:45 AM https://www.iso.org/committee/6266604.html Golda Velez, I agree with you. There is a need for general awareness among the government/decision-makers in these countries as well. 🙂 Sidra Jan 29, 2021, 5:57 AM 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. Sadia Mehmood Jan 29, 2021, 8:26 AM 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. Andrew Levine Jan 29, 2021, 3:30 PM 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) Golda Velez Jan 29, 2021, 8:40 PM 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. Shahmeer Khan Jan 29, 2021, 10:22 PM
