As long as the Bitcoin network continues to be secure and is not banned by governments it will definately survive.

Like everyone else, I adopted bitcoins because of the current rules in place regarding coin generation etc so I would not like to see that changed.

My point was that for the dwindling interest in bitcoins combined with the high price and inflation, prices looked to fall further (which they have).

I see two paths to success for Bitcoin that are easily achievable in the next 6-12 months..

1.
We need grass roots support, mom and pop stores accepting bitcoin in their stores. Its easy for them to setup and saves them merchant fees, the only reason they don't is because most dont know about bitcoin.  Once the major chains see the little guys winning with bitcoin they will adopt it for sure.

2.
A mini bitcoin economy where someone wants to live solely on bitcoins. Then they can earn bitcoins for work, spend them on food, rent, beer etc and of course pay their taxes.  It would only take 5-10 merchants to provide these services (in Australia you can already pay your bills and taxes via bitcoin through spendbitcoins) and someone could live "off the grid" with bitcoins.  Not needing to cash-out to dollars would mean more people saving their bitcoins and demand rising substantially.

Interesting fact, there's about 3 million btc to be mined up until Dec 2012 before the reward drops to 25btc.  BitcoinStatus shows about 48k bitcoin clients running and i'm assuming each client = one person.  At the current price of $2.15usd it would only cost each person $140usd to buy up ALL those coins.