It appears they've decided to make the argument to governments that MasterCard is a better platform for surveillance and control.
Which is odd, because IMHO the anonymity aspect of bitcoin will decrease as it is more widely adopted, especially when most people get it through payroll, rather than via exchanges. If anything, bitcoin has many of the benefits of cash, but includes trace-ability.
You've at least got to hand it to them that they perceive the threat bitcoin posses to MasterCard. There is likely going to be a serious payments lobbying war in the US over the next few years.
It's great you still believe in Bitcoin.
The problem is that the traders killed it at a mean of alternative paiement option. It became a hasardous investment vehicule. So it lack any trust. No way it could get back from the last year ups and downs. And any crypto-curency from now on, will suffer fom this reputation. Really, really a shame, it was another nice idea killed by greed. And Mastercard, or the governement -with it's communication about SilkRoad criminals =crypto-currency - have it easy to put a nail on the cofin of crypto-currency.
Mastercard can influence regulators in the US, but it is a global network, which will make their work difficult. There is now more than $400M of VC invested in bitcoin companies, and it doesn't look to be slowing down. At the same time daily transactions are increasing rapidly, and these are only on-chain transactions. Many app transactions are off-chain. For example, ChangeTip has been growing quickly, and all of their transactions are off-chain. BTC remains a hazardous investment vehicle, however the bitcoin protocol has a lot of upsides that are being leveraged by an increasing number of companies. IMO it would be crazy to think that BTC could have a stable price so early on in its adoption. It gets value and stability from a network effect, and that network is still relatively small. IMHO focusing upon the price of BTC is missing the forest for the trees. The VC investment isn't drawn by the price of BTC.