I think a lot of the people who are freaking out about Bitcoin being "declared dead" are the ones who have Bitcoin as the majority of their cryptocurrency holdings. Bitcoin may not survive with all the infighting and and the limitations on how fast the Bitcoin network can process a lot of microtransactions, but that doesn't mean that major players won't simply leap to another cryptocurrency and keep right on going if it dies. I've been accepting a lot of altcoins (the ones I think are worth supporting) for my writing services on my blog as kind of a way of hedging my bets. The ideas that went into the original Bitcoin won't die so easily once they've gotten this far if we just don't let it.