Bitcoin will remain unregulated. It doesnt matter if people in the community want it regulated or if government(s) want it regulated. Bitcoin, by nature, is unregulated. They cannot seize your btc unless under duress, etc. You are your own bank.
Until the devs fork it and say: "Here is the regulated Bitcoin 2.0 which will be worth 10000USD because of big company involvement, if you don't want use it then use the unregulated Bitcoin 1.0 for illegal activities which will be worth about 2USD."
Looking at the majority of people involved in Bitcoin i'd place my money on that everybody would go for 2.0. Of course, the Bitcoin Foundation together with other large companies (paypal, banks etc), will make a plan to slowly manipulate us into believing that a regulated Bitcoin will be much better for everyone. If you ask me, it has already begun.
I'm still confused by this whole discussion, and I think people aren't thinking this through and are failing to appreciate the nuance of what it would even mean to regulate bitcoin, or any other payment system built on the distributed, blockchain model.
Can we all pause for a moment and try to explain what it would even mean to "regulate bitcoin"? By its nature, a distributed, majority rules rule, blockchain system is resistant to top-down, state imposed regulation of
itself. In that sense, neither bitcoin, nor litecoin, nor any other system based on this model can simply be regulated upon in the sense that some authority declares it should behave a certain way and then it is so. Again, the system is resistant to that by design. I get the sense that people are worried that the system will be regulated in this sense. It practically cannot be.
On the other hand, points of contact with the traditional financial system (e.g. banks) can be regulated upon in a top-down authoritarian way. Regulation at these points of contact is practically
impossible to prevent. In some cases regulation in this sense may even be desirable.
Can we please get clear about which sense of regulation we're talking about here.