If the ATM is charging 15% extra for Bitcoin it sounds like there is some profit to be made competing with the ATM!

There are quite a few asian exchanges, like okcoin, huobi, bitfinex, btcchina. They are actually the biggest in the world, so you don't need an american bank account, you can just transfer them money and buy bitcoins. You should also check out localbitcoins.com or download the Android app Mycelium which uses your phones GPS to find someone near you selling Bitcoins for cash.

I don't know why you think Bitcoin failed. It dropped to 25% of its previous value. If that's your definition AAPL failed in 1997! And, in the meantime, the number of Bitcoin transactions just cracked another all-time-high

You'll get lots of different opinions, but there are plenty of weaknesses 1. Mining is centralized, and there's no incentive to decentralization 2. Mining is quite wasteful 3. The block size is too small for high transaction volume. Solutions require more nodes, but as the blockchain grows running a node becomes more expensive. 4. The prices is too volatile 5. Bitcoins aren't fairly distributed. My main gripe is that the price of coins is dictated by the cost of mining them, and is not related to the cost of keeping the network secure. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=600436.0) Despite all this, the increase in adoption in the last twelve months has been phenomenal. Many large retaillers (Expedia, Dell, Newgg) have started accepting bitcoin. Hundreds of ATMs have been rolled out. Numerous financial products featuring Bitcoin have been confirmed. So on the one hand, Bitcoin has some serious problems, but on the other hand, there are a lot of people with a lot of money interested in keeping it going.