I don't really consider a price increase to be a good thing. It merely makes it easier for bag holders to pass theirs off to yet greater fools, and makes it clear that bitcoin's use is speculation rather than as facilitating transactions. In other words, the only way to make it kinda work is with a huge markup to buffer the price fluctuations. This sucks for everyone except early adopters
IMO you are focusing too much on bitcoin as a currency, i.e. BTC rather than bitcoin. They are inseparable but very different. The heavy investment interest in bitcoin companies has much more to do with what can be done with bitcoin, rather than the price of BTC. See my reply to kleinbl00 here. The deep interest in bitcoin has to do with the applications it enables. The interest in the BTC currency is important, but its speculative value is the consequence of bitcoin's potential usefulness. I am bullish about the long term price of BTC because I am bullish about the long term utility of bitcoin as a protocol for new applications. I expect the protocol to become widely adopted.
I would have probably made that distinction a year or so ago. However, at this point, I believe that bitcoin has such a first mover advantage and a network effect, that I see little potential that another cryptocurrency will supplant it. The most interesting alternate that I have seen is ethereum, and I got some ether in the presale, but I suspect that it won't win out. As bitcoin's codebase can be altered to adopt advantageous characteristics, and as things like sidechains allow for flexibility beyond bitcoin protocol itself, and as the amount of capital backing bitcoin companies is orders of magnitude higher than all the rest combined, I just don't see it happening. Even the deflationary nature of bitcoin can be changed with just a couple of lines of code. Of course, everyone claims that there will be a fork rebellion in the event of something like that changing, but imagine a future world that depends upon the bitcoin protocol, whereby the codebase is regulated by the UN/WTO/WorldBank or something like it. If every company in the world must use the 'legal blockchain' that that consortium maintains, then people will have little choice but to use that resulting BTC.
How is this different from current affairs?[...] the codebase is regulated by the UN/WTO/WorldBank or something like it. If every company in the world must use the 'legal blockchain' that that consortium maintains, then people will have little choice but to use that resulting BTC.