Mastercard can influence regulators in the US, but it is a global network, which will make their work difficult. There is now more than $400M of VC invested in bitcoin companies, and it doesn't look to be slowing down. At the same time daily transactions are increasing rapidly, and these are only on-chain transactions. Many app transactions are off-chain. For example, ChangeTip has been growing quickly, and all of their transactions are off-chain. BTC remains a hazardous investment vehicle, however the bitcoin protocol has a lot of upsides that are being leveraged by an increasing number of companies. IMO it would be crazy to think that BTC could have a stable price so early on in its adoption. It gets value and stability from a network effect, and that network is still relatively small. IMHO focusing upon the price of BTC is missing the forest for the trees. The VC investment isn't drawn by the price of BTC.