I like bitcoin for what it represents, but there are a few things that make it so very undesirable.

 There's a history of loss and scams with bitcoin (e.g. Mt gox, vaporware mining hardware)
 You don't know who to trust. If you say do your own research, I'll slap you. If I go to a Wells Fargo bank, do I have to do my own research to know if my money will be safe there? Even if I go to a local no-name bank, I can still be assured that the bank is legit.
 It's digital currency that is usually sent and received on the internet and mostly untraceable. It's like sending cash to someone's PO box. If something goes wrong, there's no way to recover your bitcoins/cash.

Regardless of how advanced any hardware will become, there is still only one block per ~10 minutes.

If blocks are being found faster than every 10 minutes, the difficulty will rise to match the hardware so that it still remains one block every ~10 minutes.

What does that mean to you or me? Well, if you're still mining with a CPU or GPU, you already know what that means. For people who are using ASICs, they have an advantage.  
Whether you are advantaged or disadvantaged, it has no affect on what a bitcoin is worth. And no affect on whether bitcoin is in any danger of being destroyed.

My bitcoins will go in the bitbucket. I don't have much anyway.

Nice to know that the feds can make up charges any time they want.

Yea, you're right. I don't need to reinvent the the wheel.

I'm hesitant to rely on any type of service, but after looking over Bitpay, I can implement it in less than 15 minutes. If I had to do it all myself, it would take weeks or months.

My first bitcoin came from Coinbase that I purchased so that I can send payment to Bitmain for an Antminer S1.  At that time, Bitmain did not accept any other types of payments except bitcoins.

Thereafter, all my bitcoins came from mining in various pools (Slush, BTC Guild, Ghash IO).

I had a small farm set up in my garage of 8 Antminer S1's. They're all gone now. I was lucky to have sold them locally before they became unprofitable.

I'm considering adding BTC as a payment method for a website.
Can anyone point me in the right direction as to a PHP library (preferably open source that does not rely on a outside service) that supports BTC transactions and monitor its confirmations.

To mods: I'm not sure if this would be better suited in the Technical Support category, Project Development category, or here. Please move this thread if you deem it better suited in another category.

LOL -  With that kind of logic, you can say that McDonald's french fries are causing Bank of America to close some of its branches.

This is actually a good thing. I bet people who were resistant on upgrading were terrified that they would lose their bitcoins. I'm sure a large percentage of them have upgraded now.

Don't forget about the thousands (or millions) of people who quit Bitcoins and left some satoshis behind.  It's probably almost nothing, but a lot of them put together might be significant.

I know I have a bunch of satoshis spread across several accounts & wallets that I own, which I've abandoned.

While giving their statement of why bitcoin is bad, Mastercard has a team working in the back room that enables them to process bitcoins as soon as regulators approve it.

Wow! op is definitely a top candidate for brain washing.
What would you conclude if I showed you two random pictures like this:

I suppose it can be done if enough people join in this project. Kinda like the SETI project, distributed computing will allow an impossibly difficult problem to be solved by millions of individual systems. If someone can figure out the math, maybe we can estimate how long and how many individual systems it might take to brute force the private key.

Well, CSI is a crime show after all. It wouldn't be too interesting if they just showed someone buying a pair of shoes with Bitcoins.
That's the way the media is. Any time there's something new that the world doesn't know about yet, they want to give it a bad spin. It's sensational news reporting and sensational entertainment. A journalism professor once told me: Good news is no news. Bad news is great news.

I haven't been to a strip club, but wouldn't most of them prohibit you from taking pictures? And if you're pulling out your smartphone to send some bitcoins, they might think you're taking pictures.

It's like betting on the horses. It's a long shot, but I suppose you could make as much as 5 to 1 odds on it. 
How credible is the person or organization selling you the option? How credible are you to pay up if it goes the other way?
Seems like a scam for everyone involved.

Yet another negative / criminal association with Bitcoin in the media. If there was a PR rep for Bitcoin, he'd quit his job.

Everyone has ideas. Your idea to make a decentralized virtual currency is just like any other idea.
If my idea was to create a spaceship that can travel at light speed (a la Star Trek), it doesn't mean I invented it. Or how about a car that runs just on water? These ideas mean nothing.

Yes, it does seem that bitcoin has a disproportionally high scam rate compared to fiat. I don't have any solid facts or figures to go on, but it just seems that way.
But even without facts and figures, the general population's perception of bitcoin can lead to its demise. And even many people in this forum tend to think negatively about the Bitcoin Foundation, the one organization that is thought to be the "central authority" in bitcoin.

So does anyone here mine any more? I stopped about a year ago. I know that most people have turned off their rigs because of the cost of electricity is far more than the value of bitcoins mined.
That means only the mega-large farms and a few small home miners who get free electricity due to some rental arrangement are the last miners.

Is that an accurate assumption?