I agree that the main thing causing lack of growth of bitcoin is that it is just a geeky pain in the ass not geared towards the common person and the common person would not even understand a need / use for it except maybe for two things right now:
#1 silk road
College kids find out about silk road, which only takes bitcoin, which leads them to find out about bitcoin and want to buy stuff. It is ridiculous but this is probably the number one thing holding the bitcoin to any real value right now because why in the hell would you go through all the hoops and hassles for anything else? Wire money to some strange internet company you no nothing about to get a weird intermediate currency / commodity to buy what? Overpriced socks and bad dry and canned food? Why not just BUY the stuff with your currency.
2 - gambling sites
People love gambling and bitcoin is perfect for this - we haven't seen any major sites embrace it but little ones have popped up. So you can actually play poker online for real money, but it's still a pain in the ass for the average joe.
All other bitcoin value right now (which I guess would be the #3 thing pegging it to any value) is based on speculation from miners and computer geeks and some investors / traders buying and selling - or a few people trying to move money around without being taxed / noticed. There are some exeptions with the very very few trendy places in NYC and a few other tech hubs in the world that actually have real places that accept bitcoins fpr tangible things like food and items without markups - but again the question begs - why would you use bitcoins there if you are a REGULAR person? You wouldn't, because you would just use your normal currency. The people spending bitcoins at these places right now are miners who are feeling cool that they got lunch out of letting their gpus run.
I have tried to spread bitcoin and the idea of it to non tech friends and it's a hard sell - unless they are a stoner and you tell them about silk road, then they are motivated.
There needs to be the SAME level of motivation for the average joe and it needs to be easy and greatly improved - the client, the wallet issues, backing them up securely - this all needs to be in a nice friendly app / gui for dummies - otherwise this is going to remain a technotoy currency for hobbyists, despite its lofty ideas. Average people don't want to hear about keys and encryption, it makes them run away, this needs to be built in to the client with backup built in and "and idiots guide" book pdf with the client or app.
The easiest / fastest way to get bitcoins so far is exchB by far (for U.S,). You deposit cash, you get your money on account very fast - BUT - this is STILL too complex for the average joe... he wants to go to a place like a bank and just hand money over and get the bitcoins and buy his stuff on silk road or play his poker or send his money to friends in a third world country. Average joe wants to buy some bitcoins right now and hand over the money and have the coins - average joe is not a stock market person and doesn't understand that now he has to put in a 'bid' order... "what's that?" says average joe? screw this and just uses his cash.
Bitcoin atms, and direct buy bitcoins at current price instantly needs to happen and sell in both directions easily and not on some IRC channel which is again, for geeks. Mom doesn't know what an IRC channel is. Mom knows what ebay is. If mom is really hip, mom might know what paypal is. That's as far as it goes.
The above two companies control the internet trading grid along with amazon, and for bitcoin to break through that grid it needs to be as easy, but of course, banks and ebay and paypal will see this as a threat - so it's hard to do anything direct credit card or paypal to bitcoin OFFICIALLY because it's a chargeback nightmare - but the deposit cash into an atm and get bitcoins might work.
Then there needs to be some more positive national TV coverage, and it just might work.. currently, it's geek hobby at best and only exists because of the above and miners spending and selling.
When the regular people want in, and have reason, and the massive layer of middlemen curs down, it could go through the roof. This is not currently happening though.
- Blackout