Currently I am thinking on human altruistic behavior and long term benefits vs short term benefits. I wonder if pool owners will use rewards as a way to buy hardware and donate to merchants across the developing world. This would surely put pressure on your own pool and if many enough did it one could find oneself suddenly without a pool but with a much greater adoption of Cardano.
Imagine a pool owner setting up a package of some industry grade board withstanding heat temperatures and with a battery, solar power, 4G (skip network and use telecom) and in future perhaps satellite receiver. I think this is possible to get in the 100-200$ range and should be possible for many pools to be able to donate or even micro loan to merchants. And in areas with access to electricity nearby you can build a package with better battery or only wired power cutting cost or putting more founds in the hardware parts that are needed.
Now you add to this a card reader ability or image reader ability or some form of very quickly paying to that merchants address with Cardano or a stable alt coin of Cardano (for example using Tangem cards) and add in the pool a way to show transactions done and export them (perhaps as a dAPP of the wallet for merchant to use for tax or income/expense calculations) and then do the same for raw goods bought (packaged with chip showing authenticity of product or quality or any range of other useful stuff) automating the payment process and adding this to say expenses in dAPP. In the future perhaps this will all be embedded in the phone but since we are not yet there local pool adoption would perhaps encourage more trust in such a Currency. If the local merchant uses it and can receive gains from using it that benefits the local customer as well I think that is a good recipe for adoption.
So what you got then is an incredible easy basis for a Merchant to operate a store. (combining hardware with dAPPs with such purposes.) As an example these kind of small privately owned stores are called “Sari Sari” in Philippines and these stores form one of the backbones of the local economies. Just for them not to have to write on paper book a tab of customer lending would be a huge benefit. (Oh dAPP for having Cardano due with reminders to merchant and tied to a tax & income record) Tap into that and you will have massive growth in adoption and real incentives to adopt.
And while pools supporting such efforts might put oneself out of business in the short term in the longer term I think with sharding we would want large meshes of local pools across nations in my opinion. And since adoption would drive usage and usage would drive price what appears purely altruistic and against self interest could turn out to be a great benefit for everyone involved.
A final thing to this would be setting up solo staking and allowing local customers to stake through a local merchants pool. These pools could be offline when not in business hours but spread them across the world and there will always be pools available using a mesh of different networks. Perhaps with sharding one can have local randomization to ensure fairness of system but with network paths taken by software running / dAPPS that encourage lower latency on the paths of the different shards.
So anyhow that is my rant for today. Felt like ranting. There are so many possibilities for great dAPPS and combining that with these hardware capabilities. For anyone interested I think one huge area of potential is in how we create contracts both legal and financially with domain specific languages. I have discussed this in some lenght with theory in the bitlaw thread.