Yep, it's far from dead, it's thriving. I see, here and elsewhere a lot of armchair experts. The truth is that BTC's success will not hinge on the adoption by a college kid that thinks they're cool, but rather by adoption by the corporate world. Companies remit payments of millions of dollars per day and have to pay large percentages to do so. If there's a way to facilitate these payments at a far reduced price and the liability isn't a concern, they'll do it. This is a $580 billion a year market. This is the space the banks are competing for right now. Everyone thinks the money is on the consumer side. It's not. BTC is here to stay. It's just not going to be the path towards relevance people commonly think of. Also, US banks and the regulatory climate need to change their tune. -Awful. Stifling innovation.
Yet without regulation, it's going to be manipulated to hell and back and be everything but what the original anarchist/libertarian adopters wanted. The corporate world and "evil banks" are what a lot of the diehard adopters are trying to get away from, and I think they are in for a rude wake up call when they finally do get involved and start playing the game. Wait til high frequency trading and planned booms and busts start happening in an unregulated stock/currency/speculation market such as BTC. Unlike fiat currency and gold, there is absolutely nothing backing BTC. It's the wild west of stocks/currencies/whatever-you-want-to-call-its. I like bitcoin, but it's more ripe for corporate take-over than the fiat currency that a lot of the adopters are trying to get away from. This isn't to say it won't be successful, but it's ripe for pillaging.BTC's success will not hinge on the adoption by a college kid that thinks they're cool, but rather by adoption by the corporate world.
The problem is not that it doesn't have regulation, but rather that it has ambiguous regulation. As it stands, you can't start up a business that facilitates the transaction of bitcoin without being a registered money transmitter in the US. This requires state by state registry, with legal representation in each state you are registering. This is extremely expensive. People could be creating some pretty kick ass businesses in the BTC space, utilizing block chain technology, but they can't. Couple this with the FACT that no banks will bank with a BTC business and you have a virtually impossible industry to do business in, UNLESS you are an established bank, are heavily backed by a known VC firm etc. But the way most startups in a nascent space get up and running is by being boot-strapped and forward thinking. -Those things don't matter with BTC. Good ideas can't flourish. It sucks. I speak from experience.