Regulation is needed or else the whole ecosystem will be a wild west and regular people won't join the network, so there has to be trust.
I don’t believe Bitcoin can be regulated by any goverment… anyway Bitcoin runs well without any governmental regulation.
It can be, because exchanges and some businesses need to operate in fiat as well and fiat is regulated. It's enough for the regulators to focus on the movement of fiat within the Bitcoin ecosystem and you already have some regulations in place (it happened in China last year).
I also think regulation isn't needed but inevitable. They may not succeed but they will certainly keep on trying.
In order to achieve mainstream adoption, regulation and identification of wallet addresses is inevitable. But the paradox is that government regulation started the need of something like bitcoin, free of manipulation, controlled by no-one, yet overyone
Else it will remain within the circles in which it is now, maybe grow a little more, but never full adoption. The reason is that "the killer app" in order to achieve mainstream adoption means people want to use it like a bank, names and numbers.
My sad doom scenario is that because of the difficulties crypto faces and the enormous advantages of early adopters with regards to new users, the banks will have a own blockchain variant, before bitcoin or any other crypto could achieve full adoption.
I hope I'm wrong