I've been involved with Bitcoins for over a month now, and here is what I see as issues for beginners. These can all be fixed.
It's difficult to know how and where to buy Bitcoins. I would have probably bought them in early May if someone spelled it out. There's no place that just spells out "Sign up at Dwolla. Go here. Do this."
There is a list of exchanges on the Bitcoin wiki, there are links to exchanges on sites like WeUseCoins (as far as I know). You can't really do much more.
There is not a central responsible entity where you can 'buy Bitcoins'. That's the very nature of a decentralized currency.
There is a general fear that you will enter the wrong address, or make some installation or configuration mistake that will erase all your coins.
This is inherent to new things that are 'unknown' to people, there isn't much you can do about it... As a good example, look at the installation wizard for Ubuntu and OpenSuSE. It really can't be any simpler than that, and literally anyone can understand it, but because people never install an OS they are afraid of it. The issue is not that they don't understand it, but that they *think* they don't understand it. That's not something you can fix with a simple software update. The best way would be to just educate people, and teach them to not be afraid to do something they didn't do before.. but that's a whole different thing.
It's difficult to know whether your Bitcoins are truly secure or not, regardless of how many precautions you take. Maybe it's just me, but I'm always checking my balance to see if someone managed to steal my coins. I am pretty sure that it's an irrational fear, like when you're on a rollercoaster and it feels dangerous but really isn't.
Same as above, it's a new thing. People have to get used to it. Not very much you can do about it.
It's unclear that updating the client with a new version will not delete the current data.
Valid point.
There is a graph showing the number of coins estimated to be in circulation by year, where the number produced declines more and more. It's unclear that the value of the coins does not also follow this graph, to someone not really thinking about it.
You can't really predict the value of coins, so you can't just make a graph of it. The crucial point here is 'someone not really thinking about it'. The only way you can solve this is by making people think about it.
The forums are quite childish in general and make this all seem like some sort of game, or something amateurish that is risky to put money into.
I wouldn't call it childish, but yes, people are playful. That's most likely because Bitcoins stand so far from fiat currency (in the way they work, etc.), that it's hard for people to attach the concept of 'hard currency' to it. Not to mention there are a lot of people here who are interested in the technical aspect, and like playing around with technical things. Again, not much you can do about it.
The client needs to clearly say when it is ready to process transactions. It's very confusing to people when only 10k blocks are downloaded and the money won't go through.
Absolutely agreed. And a progress bar (if technically possible) would be very nice as well.
The Wiki for the businesses doesn't show the traffic to each one, or people's ratings of them. It's very hard to know which sites are good or not other than randomly guessing.
I don't think this is something bitcoin.org should be involved with. "Customer review" sites typically tend to attract a lot of fighting, slander, abuse, and other annoying consequences, and it would be a bad idea to distract the people taking care of Bitcoin.org and the wiki in general, by something like that. There are already review sites for Bitcoin businesses.
