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.
If you want to fly somewhere, you can do a quick Internet search, and come up with all the regular flights between your location and destination, all listed in price order, or airline order, or how you want it listed. If there were a market for it, programmers could devise Internet apps that would search for "trade" relationships. For example. Let's say you are a Walmart worker and you wanted to buy a Hotpoint refrigerator. The app could show you all the Hotpoint refrigerators across the country, and how many Walmart work hours it would take to buy whichever one was in your preferred location.
The point is, any time we want to make Bitcoin practical, we need to do the above for Bitcoin and product comparisons rather than simply for money. When we make an app like this, both the average people and the average sales company will be happier with using Bitcoin for daily purchases. We could even make it work for something as mundane as the price of meat at the grocer.
The work is already started with the scanners and bar codes in use all over the country. While I don't know the programming for the system, I believe that it is based on DOS-like programming. A company that wanted to design and develop an app for folks to use hand-helds to check prices and pay for almost anything in the marketplace at the register, all based on the current bar code and qr code, might make a fortune selling their programming to all of the marketing industry.
Once this is done, Bitcoin prices would be updated instantly, Bitcoin as an investment would become more stable and could start its upward movement, and Bitcoin would start to become a world standard for everybody, at least in America.
