Yeah, it's still alive and kicking. I try use it when I can, it has a lot of nice properties. As an unregulated industry it is abound with scams and fraud, but if you use common sense, and avoid anything remotely "get rich fast" or "altcoins" you'll do fine. If you're interested in it, I'd highly recommend signing up with circle.com or coinbase.com and buying $5 or $10 worth of bitcoin to play around

To know if it is still worth anything, check out how much people are willing to give cash for it. At the time of this writing, it is well over $600 for 1 bitcoin, which was worth less than a buck a few years ago. Is it worth anything? You tell me https://www.google.com/search?q=btc+to+usd

Recently, I heard people were doing flim flams with US $ and the internet. Should I keep using those?

It's pretty easy to get hold of BTC imo. You can either use a dedicated service like Coinbase, or buy them from sellers directly using sites like LocalBitcoins.