I want to preface this post by saying that I am supportive of Dero and its aims and I want it to succeed.  Indeed this post is motivated by a desire to see it succeed.  Hence the following comments and criticisms, based on my reading of the white paper, in no particular order.

*  The white paper is short on detail.  Many of the specifications and goals are quite vaguely worded.  I am aware of course that Dero is still very early in its development, and has more than achieved the development goals so far.  However, as more people become aware of Dero, there is going to be increasing pressure to come up with more detail.  In anticipation of this, I believe an amplification and extension of the white paper should itself be one of the goals in the roadmap outlined in the white paper.  If possible it would also be nice to have a task force whose assignment it is to work on improving and lengthening the white paper.

*  The white paper does not explain the reasons for choosing Golang as the language or why indeed the protocol needs to be rewritten at all.  I assume it is because of the planned implementation of smart contracts.  Still, some detail on the thought processes of the development team as to how they came to choose Golang, and its strengths for this project, would be useful.

*  The white paper does not explain the reason for choosing an infinite supply, with emissions steady at about 157000 per year after the first 8 years.

*  The white paper does not explain how efficiency improvements are going to be implemented, or even how the team plans to scale the protocol up to real-world usage at a later date.  One might wonder if it will be even possible to scale up the technology (all coins suffer from this problem to varying extents) so some discussion of this would be good.  People will want technical information on how the energy reduction and transaction speed issues are going to be addressed.

*  The references supplied are all to Wikipedia (apart from a link to the cryptonote white paper) and are not technical/serious.  I assume the team has done much research during the pre-development and development phases, but there is little evidence of the nature or extent of this research.  Compare for example to the rich research context surrounding Cardano (which I appreciate has a massively larger team behind it).  Some evidence of the technical research and specific results of that research (e.g. references to technical papers in the field) would be very useful.  Not to all readers of course, but the white paper could be divided into a less technical summarising section, and a more in-depth and longer technical section.

*  Currently the team is quite small, and to be successful and to meet its long terms goals the team must grow, and connections must be made with other teams and other projects, I think.  It would be good to know what the team's strategy is for expanding the scope of work being done to support and develop Dero.  I realise there is a plan to found a private company (see next bullet point) but this specific way of developing the coin must have disadvantages as well as advantages, and so far, there is no detail about what in practice it would mean.

*  If the coin is to be taken seriously, the identities of the team members, their work histories and technical experience and so on, these things must at some point be made public.  Unless the strategy is to grow the network/blockchain in such a way that it travels with its own momentum, gathering expertise and technical followers independently as it grows, as the original bitcoin did.  However even bitcoin is now more or less privately controlled (by the Bitcoin Foundation), and this does not appear to be the strategy adopted by the team anyway, as the white paper mentions a future Dero private company that will be behind the network.   Founding a company must mean full public disclosure of the technical team and its expertise.  Why wait on this?

*  Under 'Challenges' there are a bunch of things and it is not clear how these are incorporated into the roadmap.   I find the idea of using Dero as Identity with a certifying authority quite intriguing, but it raises questions, such as: what other coins do this or plan to do this (what is the competition), realistically how would this be adopted by the wider world, and how does implementing this serve to further the overall goals of the project?

*  There are issues that are not discussed, for example regulatory issues.  This is probably going to be the biggest topic in the crypto space in 2018.  What is Dero's strategy?  Cardano for example does seem to have a strategy worked out for this; it plans to be "regulatory compliant" in a way that is built into the foundations of the network.  But Cardano is not a privacy coin, and the issue of privacy/obfuscation raises further challenges in the context of regulation.  It would be great to see what strategy the Dero team has in place for dealing with this, and what the gaps in the strategy are that we need to think about.  It is hard to over-emphasise the importance of this topic, as it touches on almost every other .

These are just a few of my thoughts for now.  These are intended to be constructive criticism, with the aim of helping and furthering Dero.  I hope they will be taken in that spirit!