This is mostly because people confuse a trading-floor with an exchange. When you travel to, say, Thailand for a holiday, you don't walk into Wallstreet to trade

This is mostly because people confuse a trading-floor with an exchange. When you travel to, say, Thailand for a holiday, you don't walk into Wallstreet to trade some Dollars for Baht. Instead, you exchange some at an airport of office around the corner. MtGox (and the likes) are like that wall-street. Whereas there are a lot of smaller places to actually buy some BTC, alike that office at the airport. Yes. When you exchange Dollars for Baht, you will pay a lot more then the average rate that goes on Wallstreet at that moment. And yes, you cannot trade millions of Dollars for Bazillion of Baht. In .nl, for example, there are places where you can buy with a Dutch bank account. Works fine if you want to trade a few tens of Euros. Stop pointing people to full-blown trading-platforms when all they want is a few BTC. Instead, point them to alternatives, including your personal wallet on your android :). I, usually, explain people that they can have a few millibit, but not for Euro: the'yll have to sell me something: a bottle of wine, crate of beer, stuff that I would buy anyway. So that I can say that I bought beer with Bitcoin, and to show others that there is actually stuff you can buy for it, rather then purely some get-rich-quick-stockmarket.