Marketing is the weakness of Monero currently.
There is no marketing taking place...
...Monero is the internet's best kept secret and the community suffers from a serious lack of publicity and marketing. ...
I have felt this for quite a while. Clock's ticking, and all the advantages and strengths of Monero vis a vis other Cryptos are being appropriated by other technically inferior coins that have much better marketing. I feel bad for being so critical, when I myself am doing nothing to help the coin, but am hoping that someone with skills in the needed areas, skills which I do not have, will decide to do something before it is too late.
GUI. Smart mining. Please. Before it is too late. If it is not too late already.
edit:grammar
GUIs - already exist. Anyone in normal space doesn't give a damn whether a GUI is official or not. My first bitcoin was managed through blockchain.info via coinbase. In fact, I never used a client / core software on my PC for bitcoin (and I bet this is true for 99.9% of the people that don't traverse bitcointalk). And I bet 99% of newcomers to monero will be quite satisfied with mymonero.com, which is equivalent to blockchain.info.
Smart mining - not going to really do much for marketing, IMO. More of a nice feature that boosts the fundamentals of the currency network.
Unfortunately (or fortunately for us hodlers) the easiest and most effective method of marketing would be market-by-moon. Using very curse and naive calculations based on numbers on poloniex, to hit 1 XMR = 2 BTC (which is a good moonshot, considering) would take 2557 bitcoin, or approximately 1.1 million USD.
So if you know anyone with 1.1 million USD to burn and wants to make a quick buck (because the FOMO wave that this would cause would probably allow enough liquidity and demand to make a tidy sum off of this kind of bubble), have at it!
For an even crazier moonshot, 9713 bitcoin would be needed, to drive 1 XMR = 5000 BTC, or 4.2 million USD.
For reference, a 30 second ad in the superbowl is 4.5 million USD.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-31064972In less than 30 seconds, (clicking some things on poloniex) you could blow 4.5 million on a very effective advertising campaign for monero.