I have been around Bitcoin for awhile now and have been an investor for almost as long. I really believe that Bitcoin has the potential to be the worlds decentralized, inflationproof store of value, really electronic gold, and it's only been in the past few months that I've been reading Peter Todd's and Gregory Maxwell's writings about the bitcoin blocksize and how important the 1MB limit is to keeping Bitcoin decentralized.
Peter has a new project to create a video/website explaining the limit and how important it is to Bitcoin:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=189792 I just donated 1BTC to it myself.
Bitcoin as a payment system just doesn't drive up the price in a long-term stable way. It's just basic supply and demand and as using Bitcoin as a payment system becomes more efficient and the velocity of money goes up, the overall demand for Bitcoins goes down. At the same time you're investment is subject to the risk of alternatives that provide the same low-fees and no-refunds policies that make Bitcoin useful for payments. It really worries me to see the foundation mainly funded by companies that are invested in payments rather than Bitcoin as the store of value that it could be.
I don't think the people in Cyprus, Russia and China care about payments. I think they care about anonymity and the inability of anyone to take your coins from you. We can't let that be risked for the sake of SatoshiDice.