We all need a way to buy bitcoins right?
Indeed, and ideally IMO exchanges should be left to bots and institutional investors, while the average user should be doing it peer-to-peer. No BS fees or thefts, no regulation of economic liberty and others out of existence, and you may opt to exchange goods and services P2P rather than simply the fiat-BTC-fiat speculation closed loop. I just don't see any be-all, end-all tool for P2P ready for primetime yet. LocalBitcoins was a good first step,
Elqnt may be the second...
I think we are a failure of our own success. I mean who is running the exchanges, in-experienced, young programmers and entrepreneurs. They don't know how to run an exchange, they don't know how to deal with laws changing. You can't go into this area and have a half-assed job and think you are going to get somewhere. This isn't a web 2.0 company where you roll out and hope the servers don't fall over. An exchange needs months of testing, a legal team and a programming team that can go from new features to fixing new bugs in 2 secs without losing a cent. This isn't easy stuff, but all think it is. I get asked almost once a month to be a partner on an exchange site. And I will ask them do you have a business plan 99.9% don't have a business plan so that makes it easy. The 0.1% that does have a business plan makes zero sense and will fail in a month.