Lately I've been thinking about the future of Bitcoin, and the possibility of it becoming mainstream. The only problem I can see is getting bitcoins into the hands of everyone who wants them. Once Bitcoin has many, many users (say ~100,000,000), banks, credit cards, services like Paypal, and even governments, are going to try to do something about it.
Currently, anyone can use Paypal or Moneygram to convert their USD into BTC. But will these services take steps to prevent the purchase of Bitcoin? If a decent number of current Bitcoin users are seemingly unable to download Bitcoin-qt or Electrum (and therefore use volatile and insecure online wallets), will an 80-year-old be able to jump through all the current hoops you need to jump through to get Bitcoin, plus a few more put in place by financial institutes?
it´s often written in this forum that bitcoin is still in it´s early days. hopefully new services, new & user friendly software will be developed in the near future.
