Before you plot on murdering me and deleting my posts, I'm not talking about the fiat quasi-government banking that we are used to. I am talking about accountable institutions that can manage the currency for people in a way that people rely on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_bankingIf bitcoin is ever going to crawl out of the hole that is illegal activity and geekdom, it will need mass adoption. This does not mean the number of adopters, but how deep these people use bitcoin.
Just like people don't keep all of their money in 100 dollar bills in a safe in their home, do you think the average person is going to be able to psychologically deal with having $30,000 of their savings on some linux partition of a computer? This just is not feasible for basically everyone. Even the nerdiest nerds won't do this, the ones that can actually competently deal with the security ramifications.
Consistent accessibility and payment is what bitcoin needs for people to deeply invest and adopt it. I feel as though there is a "banking is evil" sentiment in this community, which makes sense concerning some aspects of today's system, but not about the concept of banking in general.