What are some of the things that would make bitcoin better and more accepted? More trade... more trust... more btc 'banks'...? It is such a great system. It just needs to go main stream.

Any thoughts?
Adoption is limited because of a chicken and egg program. People don't accept bitcoins because nobody else accepts bitcoins.

Normally, the way you solve a chicken and egg problem is to get the cycle going by finding a niche in which the technology works so much better than other available solutions that adoption is possible even without a critical mass -- that is, by finding a killer app. The problem with bitcoin getting started through these kinds of mechanisms is the lack of stability in the price of bitcoin relative to national currencies.

For a while, speculation and investment were the killer apps that were driving bitcoin. The problem is that if this is the driving force behind a commodity, there will inevitably be bubbles and crashes. These drive down the use of bitcoin as a medium of exchange. The adoption cycle only works if the killer app drives widespread adoption, it fails if the killer app works against it.

So that's where we're stuck. But there are a lot of really smart people working on the problem. They're working on getting ATM machines to sell bitcoins, adding the ability to accept bitcoins into widespread point-of-sale systems, solving the problem of having to wait for confirmations, and so on.