We still can't buy hardly anything with them andthe blockchain bloat problem hasn't been sorted out.
I was thinking the other day that there does not need to be a large active economy to correlate the price to, because Bitcoin can always act as a store of wealth so long as the community is large enough. But will people use it in this manner? The community is still very small.
There is rumour that this community is a very small part of the actual bitcoin economy.
By whom?
I was mining, buying and selling coins for half a year before registering on this forum. I'm sure there are many users who just don't bother registering.