Well, you can go to my bookstore cointagion.com and buy lots of ebooks :-)

But yes, for the most part bitcoin is still a solution looking for a problem. The three best candidates for large-scale future use are, in my opinion (1) sending money overseas for employees/family (2) store of value in countries with high inflation (3) some kind of business model, as yet undiscovered, involving "reverse micropayments" (by which I mean micropayments involving few buyers, many sellers)

> I couldn't buy bitcoins with my Paypal account or credit card

I'm very interested in any irreversible asset you can buy anonymously with a reversible payment method. Seriously.

You used to be able to buy lindens via credit card and pay bitcoin via lindens, but I'm not sure if that has gotten harder to do

If you're a serious speculator then you can figure out how to buy BTC with an ACH or wire transfer. Also, I suspect a lot of miners are looking for ways to spend their BTC.

I just see that more and more people adopt bitcoin, that it's anonymous, distributed and secure, and it's been described as the next best thing since banknotes - I just can't see the usefulness...

While most people want Bitcoin to replace the US dollar, I think that as a secure, decentralized payment method, it's more useful as an alternative to Paypal. Like everything else, it's usefulness is tied to the number of people who adopt it.

Do you use cash in real life to avoid telling companies what you spend, where you spent and what you spent it on? If your answer is no, then you probably won't find much value in doing the same online with bitcoins.

Nope... but I also never deposited the cash I earned under the table :-)

you can buy bitcoins using coinbase.com or localbitcoins.com