Good product, bad management, that's Dash.
lol - kinda catchy. It's easy to get frustrated with the value, pace of development, and other coins blowing by Dash with less development, history, or adoption.
For me, I'm just waiting for Evolution. I'm staying the course and we will see if Dash = Decentralized Venmo. I'm still on the fence if that even matters anymore in the short term but eventually I do feel it will. A concern I have is will these features just look like any other easy to use centralized app. Teaching someone that this is a decentralized network might just get a 'meh'. So what's next? Built out Evolution and then what? People register their names, setup wallets, and then ask-- "How do I buy bitcoin?" When we swipe a credit card, we don't care about the shop's identifier.. we swipe (or scan, or whatever) and approve the amount.
I want to know what is next-- where does the true value of Evo live and do we even know that yet. Does it become our online identify? Do we add the ability to transact other coins? If we make it stupid easy to onboard someone to an island without anything next, could be disappointing.
Took my awhile to convince couple people to accept BTC as tips for their services back in 2013 but some did agree to it. Checked back with them later as BTC ballooned and they told me they sold it long ago... If we are building Dash to become a payment network, does that mean the only holders will be MN operators?
Many open questions.. so in the wait and see mode. Get Evo out there and start building products on top.
Everything I've seen so far about DashPay looks very promising and indeed you can already test it out via the DashPay Alpha program. The developers have managed to create something truly innovative and unique in the crypto space. If the MVP works well and is secure then it's going to please many people.
When DashPay MVP is on mainnet, the push needs to be done to make Dash rise again in the rankings and make it more popular again, so more 3rd party services adopt Dash. The wider the ecosystem gets, the more usage we can see and hopefully we get some network effect going.
It is true that many people have been waiting for Evolution for a long time and hence may have disregarded Dash. It will depend on all of us to spread the word about DashPay and build on that. We are very close, afaik.
In POS transactions it doesn't matter of course to pay directly to a 'social contact', but for transactions between your friends/family/regulars it's going to be a major improvement in terms of ease of use.
Onboarding newbies should be a lot easier. The wallet simply looks great compared to what we've been used to. It is a major step forwards.
When it comes to Dash Platform, the opportunities it creates are very extensive and various projects have already been conceptualized. Building on the Dash network is going to be so much easier. I can see it spawn various products which will improve our ecosystem and will increase usage. It's possible that people are highly underestimating what the true potential is of Dash Platform.