Exactly, and approaching mini marts and even chain store donute shops is a waste of time. I'm particularly trying to say to target SMALL, TINY merchants! Those that at most have an online store! Those that travel to sell their wares, to the local college flea market, toy conventions, Sci fi fantasy conventions, heck, maybe you are unaware of how many small conventions with a vendor room, selling "fun" stuff related to the theme of the convention there are! TONS. This stuff is big and constantly growing! And these small vendors will try new things, as will their creative and fun loving customers (or maybe cheap in some circles, where they'll do anything to save a penny)I definitely agree with the idea that more merchant adoption is needed, however I view this from a different perspective.
If we look from the merchant side of things, why would they accept Dash? Who is going to spend Dash at their store? Our market cap and user base is still relatively small so if a merchant were to accept Dash I would doubt it would make that much of an impact on their earnings, if any at all. The hassle to accept Dash and then when paid in Dash to convert it to fiat, in my opinion far outweighs the benefit of accepting Dash.
I agree that this is an excellent approach, and it will hopefully reach a percentage of average customers. But it will not distinguish Dash from any other Crypto Currency!!! Dash will only be one of several at best! And Dash is even the only one paying to be included which is pretty sad IMO, but if it works, I won't argue. I'd rather be included than excluded.I look at it like this.
The debit card solution is a great initiative as it allows more people to store their money in Dash because they now have an easy way to spend it if needed. Because of this, Dash acts a lot more like an everyday currency which is great because prior to this it was just a speculative asset. Once more people use Dash as a currency and more speculative money comes in then the market cap will rise which makes us a more attractive option for crypto services to integrate and merchants to accept. Think of services such as payment processors (bitpay, spectrocoin, coinbase etc). These integrations all of a sudden make it really easy for merchants to accept Dash as they resolve the issue of converting Dash to fiat and the issue of setting up Dash as a payment option.
Dash has Instant Send, it's unique, it's safe and WORKS, and doesn't really technically need 3rd parties. Sure, these 3rd parties are going to help us get recognized, and that's great, but if we want to REALLY show off, we need to build - at the same time of course - a grass roots level adoption. From both ends we must burn the midnight candle!
I'm not arguing against this, I hope that's clear. I'm arguing not to leave ANY stone unturnned and there is a freaking Pink and Purple stone jumping and jittering right in front of us that wants to be unturned, but we are IGNORING it for some odd weird reason, I simply can't understand????I agree that we do need our own POS team who works on a solution for merchants but I do think the first push should be to get already existing payment processors to integrate Dash so that we can easily onboard merchants. In conjunction to this I think that continued work on Fiat Gateways is needed so that merchants can easily sell dash to fiat no matter where they are situated in the world. When we have all these things worked out, our market cap should be a lot higher meaning that merchants will have more of an incentive to accept us and we will have more money in the treasury to fund a POS team and merchant sales team.
At this time I feel uneasy asking a merchant to accept Dash because I know that the process of accepting Dash is going to be extremely complicated and the process of selling the Dash for fiat is going to be even more difficult.
So to get to my point, I do agree with you but I think the order in which things are happening is necessary right now. Partnerships and integrations first then our own merchant solution. Baby steps.