I have been thinking lately about the barriers to broad scale adoption of cryptos in the United States. I am not focused on getting retailers to accept cryptos, but more on the mind of the consumer/user. While I don't think this is a complete list, here are some factors I thought of that I rarely (if ever) hear discussed:
(1) Inability to think multi-currency -- The US economy is so insulated from foreign exchange that most of our population just doesn't think outside of US dollars. Interaction with Mexico and Canada is limited and often can be done in USD. Foreign transactions are completed automatically by payment processors. We've never had an environment like pre-Euro Europe where traveling a short distance forced you to pay with a different currency. Thus, I think people struggle with the fact that they have to translate everything back to USD. An analogy might be a person learning a new language. At first they translate everything back to their native tongue; it takes time and practice to think directly in the second language.
(2) Not seeing adoption by friends and neighbors - This is just the whole follow-the-crown phenomenon. Crypto needs a critical mass of early adopters to get the ball rolling; we don't have that yet here in the same way that there is in Asia (for example.)
(3) Technical resistance / complexity - We won't get widespread adoption until the user interfaces become more intuituve and transitions into and out of USD are made more seamless (and less expensive).
(4) Lack of financial education - Most of the US population does not understand their own financial system and doesn't see any issue with the USD as money. They don't understand the definition of money and therefore think it has to be issued by a government. They don't understand inflation vs deflation and what it does to their buying power. Etc.
(5) Pervasive lack of concern for privacy -- Privacy seems to not be a concern for most people. Whether through apathy, ignorance, or brainwashing, most of the populations seems to be happy to provide intimate details of their lives on facebook, have all of their email scanned an analyzed when using free services like hotmail and gmail, and have the full breadth of their financial lives exposed to banking and payment processing institutions.
(6) Active disinterest in self-ownership -- Lose your password -> call someone to get it reset. Have a problem with a vendor -> cancel the transaction. Fraud -> get your account made whole. We have a culture of someone else owning the problems. In the current crypto environment, this structure is not in place (at least not in the same way.) The individual is responsible for evaluating different technical solutions and maintaining their own private keys; help may be available, but it is not just a phone call away. Many people just don't have the knowledge, or the inclination to deal with it and a very many people don't want the responsibility. (Of course, there are services that provide some of these functions in the crypto space, but all of them come with trade-offs.)
Just some things to ruminate on. Anything to add?