Sadly this will make it even harder to get new people in, if they don't actually see any progress in the first few weeks/months of "usage".
Guess most testers wont stay long enough to generate anything.

If you ask me, it's way to early.
We only got a few thousand users and almost nothing to "buy" for coins, why would someone want to "add value" to it?

Sure, that's running machines, but not users.  

My point is, as long as we dont see some more stuff sold for bitcoins, there's almost no other reason to "use" bitcoin but to generate coins (to sell and make money of it and buy the stuff they want) for new users.
So far it's just a cute crypto-communities baby, that noone out there cares about, except for those crypto-freaks and wanna-be-anonyms.
If we want to beat PayPal, we need a whole lot more users,
but why should they use bitcoin instead of PayPal, if they need to use PayPal to buy bitcoins anyway and cant buy the stuff they want for bitcoins but for PayPal?

Not sure if i get that right,
like to buy pizza and cigs with your coin-card?
No.

You don't buy stuff on your local market for PayPal (or other virtual currencies), do you?
But you do online. There's not much choice if you want to buy with bitcoins.
You have to check this site to see what's available and if your lucky, you get something, prolly not what you are looking for.
So why use it?

True, still 2weeks+ to generate something on an average-users desktop (to finally notice: "it works!", or "damn, no luck and next diff.upgrade")
is way to much for most people. Those i know are not that patient, are you?
And still, what for, if theres nothing todo with those coins besides get-your-energy-costs-back by selling them on the market?

What do you tell people to MAKE THEM USE bitcoins?
Why should they download and install?
They want to buy stuff, but there isnt any.
They want to "make money", but they got no server-farm to spare.
What other reasons are there to use a system like this?

I for myself just do it to support the system, nothing else.
I havent bought anything so far and i'm not planning to in the near future (except a lot more onlineshops and isps accept them)
and i'm not making any profit of it, so far it just costs me, but i dont care, it's kinda fun and might even work (or be worth the effort) someday, so i wanna be part of it.

But I'm not the average guy or girl that just wants to buy stuff online, if i were, i wouldnt use bitcoins at all, i'd just use PayPal, or moneybookers, or my CC.
Oh wait, i'm average, i do exactly that, why don't i buy stuff with bitcoins?

I just checked the block averages, since the bump up in difficulty the average has actually be lowered to about the 6/hour target now (where as before it seem to be 10/hour and the difficulty was always climbing)

Seeing how the new client is a lot faster now, seems the difficulty finally caught up with the CPU power out there. I wonder if the difficulty will go again in the next week or so. 

Here is a new plot of the difficulty since the start:



note the log vertical axis, don't be misled, the recent increases are bigger than they may look.

Just present the people an easy and convenient way to vote with their bitcoins for
forum posts, or blog comments, etc.
I mean, there should be a lot of software in the form of plugins and libraries for
the most popular social networking software packages, that allow any administrator
to integrate Bitcoin vote system into his site.
People will spend bitcoins just for fun, raising the demand for them.

How about sponsoring some experienced marketer to promote the system further.
I'll send my bitcoins to whatever address you present me on this forum for such purpose.
Surely!