US investors are... lurking in the wings.

Even if this is true, this is the number one reason, Bitcoin will fail as a currency. Average people need to buy it and spend it. Investors just pumping the price up means nothing toward usefulness. It's a temporary and artificial valuation.
No it isn't. We're already using the basics of this technology and have long since accepted digital transactions. The "currency" part on a mainstream level isn't a pipe dream anymore than frequent flier miles, marboro stamps, starbucks bucks or all that sort of thing. Mainstream society WILL accept bitcoin because all these VC firms and big money players are *investing in bitcoin* as a future, as a technology, as a game changer and working to solve the infrastructural problems, security scenarios, and wide scale adoption PR campaigns to lure the public toward adopting bitcoin in a fun way instead of the way things are at this moment, which is you're on your own to figure out what bitcoin is and why it's a game changer, and how/when you can/should make money with it, or that it's a financial investment and so on, or whether or not the media is doing your thinking for you.
Bitcoin isn't "down the road"...it's already here and it's successfully, wildly successfully carving out its niche. A decade from now the whole evolution of cryptocurrency could have us all just "mind rich" where we slip on google glasses and wink and suddenly have new wealth - whatever future tech grows out of it. To not invest in it because it might not be a thing is short sighted on your end and not really grasping what it is.
Investing in bitcoin as a technology and a future way of doing money is the real investment you're spending money on. As long as you see it as just another stock you can dump some money in and cash out, serving only yourself, you're going to lose til you get scared and run away...and you'll still end up using bitcoin as regularly as you use the internet in spite of yourself.
They are getting in and making it happen. In the next two years we'll be seeing bitcoin bust out of the gate on a massive adoption scale with more people buying bitcoin because it was made 10x easier and less of a learning curve than it is today.