At least more people are buying coins, and more and more merchants are accepting bitcoins. This is going to be a very long and gradual process to critical mass where it then becomes a viable currency. Right now it's a speculative investment. Perhaps that is a viable route towards becoming a currency, who knows. This is Darwinian and no one can predict what will happen and no one can know how it "should" happen. All we know right now is "something is happening" and you're either on board or you're on the sidelines watching.

In my opinion the word "currency" is about as stupid as that thing in your pocket people still keep calling a "phone". It's best approximated legacy words we have to express ideas about something which it doesn't entirely fit. More interesting, for me, is a comment I read on HN a few days back where someone said "I could be carrying a million dollars on this thumb drive and no one would even know.", a distributed ledger, the script language in the bitcoin protocol, etc. these things transcend the word "currency" as we ordinarily use it.