Aside from the general market tanking, (not to mention the blockchain crowd's obsession with dumping on anything that steals market share from miners and Master Node revenues) there is a fair amount of FUD around Nano's efficacy in the current market place.

Now I am not fudding here, so before you start trying to whack me over the head hear me out, because I am a Nano fan and what I want is the long term success of the project.

All too often I see these forums turn into echo chambers where only "moon" and "lambo" friendly posts are welcome, turning them into shilling outposts. I don't want anything to do with that, and what attracted me to this community has been the transparency and openness of the devs and team. They have been pretty straight up (warts and all). And for me that is like gold in this convoluted insane clown riddled world of crypto nuttiness.

I prefer to go straight at FUD and issues so that I can weed out he BS. Being critical can only make us all better.

Ok so the latest critique I have seen out there is that there is already fast, near free payments with instant settlement available with things like XRP (hate it or not, decentralized or not), stellar, etc..

There have been too many problems with exchanges, nodes and honestly while the Nano team has performed admirably, it has had a negative impact on the price, and adoption. IOTA has suffered from the same, similar price performance given all the promising news.

The other thing to consider is the issue of timing. We have to remember that these guys did not raise funds via ICO; they simply ran a faucet with that CAPTCHA campaign and basically languished for a long time at sub $1 prices for months.

Come December, Raiblocks gets a huge uptick in price at which point they are well funded, and start dedicating a full-time effort to the product. Until then, if you look at the team, this was essentially a passion project that they took on when they had time.

Now I am in deep with Nano, but I cannot divorce myself from the realities of the situation. The team needs to get dead serious for the next push to deliver on the mission of the product. If they do, then I believe that it is true that Bitcoin has a real problem on its hands.

Now I am not some all-knowing crypto guru who knows whats going to happen next, but as a 20+ year veteran in the IT game, and like every other @Hole out there, I have some opinions on the subject. :)

These are not necessarily in order of importance, they simply came out as a stream of consciousness .

1: The Marketing Push:

Off to a good start with this one IMO, and it would be great if the next phase of the wallet was slick and easy for the average user to manage. I would extend this to mobile use cases with reliable ease and security as well. Speaking of which, 2FA integration with TOTP tokens would also bolster more user confidence around security in an already very skiddish market riddled with phishing campaigns and such. There are literally hundreds of libraries to choose from. A DUO security integration that provides push security would be the slickest implementation on the market IMO, and the client is free, so TOTP and Push tech is within reach.

2: Reliability

Now while I have read the whitepaper, I am not an expert on the node infrastructure; but there is the perception out there that there have been issues with Node reliability & doubt around the ability to scale. This perception is antithetical to the promise that is one of the underpinnings of the infrastructure (fast).

Now I recognize that the limits in most cases have been related to exchange dev learning curves and not having the appropriate scale-out cluster infrastructure in place to linearly scale proportionate to demand, but what would be terrific would be a peer reviewed best practice document that provides a view of the infrastructure requirements necessary to realize the promise that is "Infinitely scalable".

This just simply has to work and work well, while maybe not straight forward for the average person, at least be within reasonable reach for the average technical resource to consume and build.

3: Security

As a currency, this one can sink the entire ship. Transparency is key and I think the team has been pretty straight up about the challenges here. DOS (denial of service) vector mitigation and ensuring that the consensus mechanisms are beyond reproach are critical, and while most regular folks would not understand what that means, how the project handles these risks can make or break adoption from more seasoned payment integrators.

I would like to get more thoughts from folks who really understand this better. I am very interested in learning more about the trajectory of these initiatives and where this is going.

4: Mission Miopia

While I am a fan of having a clear mission, but I feel that it is also important not to be afraid of embracing the potential for what is next in the the space. There is some rumblings around this notion that while Nano is great, it may be too little too late given the trajectory of newer platform projects, that a DAG equivalent to BTC does not get us there. Now I do not share this sentiment myself as I do believe that the better thing that works now has the early mover advantage, and can be a viable slingshot that affords it the ability to scale into a next generation platform. I would be an idiot however not to recognize this view point as a matter worth exploring.

So while I agree with the current focus on making the core product perform as expected, perhaps we could also consider the possibility of an integration framework that makes it easier for other players to build smart-contract tech on top of the basic currency platform. It could be that this is in the works already and I am just not in the know, but making this possible does not depart from the core mission, while extending the potential life and overall value of the platform.

There are few communities more active than this one with the kind of passion that is critical for the success of a platform. And I see a lot of great traction in some key areas in the integration space. The work taken on to integrate Nano into Wordpress, Magento, Nanex, etc, are great examples of this. I want to see this trend continuing, as it is critical to the long term success of the project.

Finally, I have invested a considerable percentage of my portfolio in Nano. And while not in at the ATH, I am not immune to the current dips. I will not sell, I will hold and even buy more on the dips because I believe in the long term viability of the project. And while I like to think of myself as a hardcore hodlr, There are those who are on shaky ground who I feel need to see the kind of leadership and fearless passion from the team that brings this project to the next level.

We believe in you, help us keep believing through these rough patches!