Yes and no. Yes: the public has somewhat lost its interest in Bitcoin. It's no longer new to them, it's no longer in a price frenzy, the hype is gone. No: tha

Yes and no. Yes: the public has somewhat lost its interest in Bitcoin. It's no longer new to them, it's no longer in a price frenzy, the hype is gone. No: that the hype is gone doesn't mean that Bitcoin is no longer 'hot'. There are still massive developments and there's still massive interest in Bitcoin, but it has just assumed some more realistic proportions. There are TONS of huge things going on behind the scenes that the general public is not interested in, but that are really really promising for the future of Bitcoin. The amount of VC money flowing into Bitcoin is enormous, more and more shops keep accepting Bitcoin (in 2014 we've seen companies like Dell, Overstock, TigerDirect, PayPal, Braintree, Newegg and many others starting to accept Bitcoin) and behind the scenes there are loads of developments. I think that Bitcoin WILL be huge, but that the general public will never care about it and will almost never use it directly. I see Bitcoin as just a network, or a protocol. Tons of payment services will be built on top of Bitcoin, offering superior service to the customer, but abstracting any interaction with Bitcoin away for the end user. For example: this week came out that the 3 biggest banks in the Netherlands (ING, ABN AMRO, Rabobank) have been investigating Bitcoin for a year now and are looking to make all their transactions work through the blockchain. The user wouldn't notice anything different, but the bank would be able to provide its services much faster and much cheaper.