More people would use altcoins if it was as simple as any other transaction these days, like swiping a card. It's not quite that simple for a lot of the non-techs out there. Some folks to this day avoid paypal even, and that's among the easiest systems out there.
If you could make a front end system for the 'general masses' which was super-dumbified-down, then you'd have a rush of people getting into at least using it for transactions.
totally agree, although there are App's in the works, after thinking about it, the 'silver' generation (granny) still prefer paper or plastic
Yeah.. if you could make it as easy as 'do i use my visa, my bank card, my paypal, or my bitcoin card..' then you'll be golden. Until that point, I picture cryptcoin transactions as something similar to the first few days of PayPal.. lots of potential awesome, but it has a long way to go before there's spread adoption.
Another thing.
No one is going to show the bitcoin community love as long as greedy hoarders are the face of it. That needs to change, and everyone will make an episode about bitcoin.
No one wants to tell everyone watching TV to go talk to a bunch of assholes (the current bitcoin community).
What would help get around this, like I said above, is if it were simply easier to pay with--because the coins will then go to merchants and get in their hands that way. It will spread slowly.
Get some sort of simple interface going, especially for multiple coins, which a merchant can adopt, and you'll see the embers start to pop up.
What would be even more amazing is if a central online merchant or retailer, Amazon comes to mind, were to allow cryptcoin payments.. oh my gosh, could you imagine how awesome that would be? Overnight there would be a surge.
And a huge jump in the value of BTC. This is what I hope for, because if the value skyrockets much quicker than difficulty, then the "no ROI ever" troll will be put into a box, at least for a short while.