When Paypal first started, nobody had an account - therefore the value of the paypal "network" was practically worthless.

The stroke of genius that Paypal had to get rapid adoption of it's payment system was to allow people to "send money" to others without a Paypal account.

Thus, if that person wanted that money - they would sign up for that Paypal account. Obviously, rapid adoption of Paypal followed.

This functionality *needs* to be implemented into Bitcoin. The biggest problem I have heard from users is "how do I get BTC". It's an annoyingly slow, painful process - even for the tech savvy.

I see two ways of implementation - the first being a "Paypal" like intermediary - though they run the risk of becoming the Paypal of the BTC world (fees on top of fees, etc) - the second would be a simple open sourced web implementation that allowed people to easily send money to someone that wasn't already familiar with Bitcoin.

I imagine a website that allows you to enter someone's email address, they (the website opeator) in turn receive the payment and send an email to the user explaining how to claim their BTC. Once the user does this - they have now crossed the threshold of pain in getting started with BTC. I'm sure what worked for Paypal, would work just as well for BTC.

Personally, I would use this site to send money to my friends - and I would also begin to use it for transactions on Craigslist, etc. Right now the running joke in our office is that we will pay each other back in BTC. Why? Because it's just so flippin' hard to use.

This would be blindingly simple to implement - and quite honestly, I'm willing to pony up 10BTC to see this developed - who else is willing to pitch in?