It is clear that bitcoin is in a serious crisis:

• It is somewhat NOT trying at all to solve the most obvious problems such as setting a roadmap to tackle increasing blockchain size and allowing bigger transaction size.
• The same problem applies to the appalling transaction speed which could be easily fixed in a variety of ways, some solutions are discussed here.
• Bitcoin peer network is in decline: number of network nodes has reached dangerously low levels because there is no monetary incentive whatsoever to run bitcoin nodes. Interesting solutions which do create such monetary incentives for people to run bitcoin nodes are so far ignored under dubious pretexts.
• In addition, the peer network functions very poorly (in our experience) cannot handle small-fee transactions and actually some researchers claimed that with current fees rational miners should reject bitcoin transactions because they increase the probability that their block will be discarded.
• Bitcoin has an appalling track record of NOT trying to improve on the questions of bitcoin security and cryptography.
• Overall bitcoin is chronically under-developed: only 3 people are currently paid for bitcoin development, there’s almost nothing happening, and only one of these three is working on any improvements at all, as explained recently by Mike Hearn.