It doesn't affect those companies since they accepts through Bitpay and Coinbase, and Mega doesn't matter enough. However, perception may be damaged, and we are above the exponential trendline so the drop will be sharper and might induce a longer panic. That would be a godsend for all who understand Bitcoin and think they missed their chance to buy in.

The "centralization" that is to be feared is monopolization, not merely having power with one occupation, like mining. As long as there is no forcible barrier to entry, there will not be centralization. Even with only ten miners controlling the network we'd be fine. If it got down to 3 or 4 I'd start to worry...but so would everyone else and they'd give them a rough time because of that, naturally curbing any centralizing tendency.

Never underestimate how much semantics affect people's ability to think clearly.

Your suggestion is extremely valuable, in my opinion, and there are quite a few other misnomers in the Bitcoin world and especially surrounding the blocksize issue. Using accurate terminology is crucial for arriving at sound judgments.

Flawless performance by Voorhees.

Note: The libertarian introduction to Bitcoin is old and has many outdated links and some outdated info. Since many people will be reading it, acleanup would be helpful.

They need to hit the target only to maintain the vendor contract with Ingram Micro so that they can have access to the lowest tier of wholesale prices. So this push makes sense. After this, the store can sink or swim on its own.

Slippage-free. You can buy large amounts at the wall price without having to pay more and more along the way as your own buying action drives up the price (a.k.a. slippage).

I sure hope that friend is paying in BTC!

The 50/50 split people tend to imagine is totally bogus. No one is going to implement a change until there's a clear majority in favor of it, along with major infrastructure like MtGox, blockchain.info, Coinbase, etc. backing the change. Then when crunch time hits, even if something like 10-20% had been rejecting the change, once they see it is happening for real most of the holdouts will give up and switch to the main fork, since the main fork - for better or worse - is where Bitcoin's future is. At most a few % will stick to the original, but that won't be much of a problem. It'll just be branded Holdoutcoin or Oldcoin and people will move on.

I made the original flow chart that appears in this infographic, and since it was for the audience here on bitcointalk.org I deliberately chose the word "hoarding" to make people realize that hoarding is not bad. However, for a mainstream audience it's probably better to change it to "saving" to avoid opening up that can of worms.

The price action today was in line with the exponential growth since January. For the first time, the price started growing even faster than that exponential trendline, and it quickly overcorrected to below the exponential trendline, then back onto the trendline. It simply got overexcited, then reverted to the norm.

We remain almost uncannily dead-set on that exponential curve that puts BTC at $50 by late March and $100 by the end of April.

You may want to bring this to Service Discussion.

In summary, market-induced centralization is not a kind of centralization to be feared, because it is self-limiting.

People who think the centralization will continue to dangerous levels are guilty of static thinking and treating miners as robots. The incentive structure for miners is dynamic, not static: it changes as the consensus blocksize limit increases, automatically curbing any over-centralization.

Remember most of all that the current level of decentralization is arbitrary, because the blocksize limit is arbitrary. If more decentralized is always better, why not make the blocksize even smaller? There is an optimal amount of decentralization, but no one knows what it is, and letting go of the blocksize limit will allow the market to find it.

It never fails...

My sense is that the core motivation for most gamblers is the chance that they could win big. If they have bitcoins, they are already used to the "gamble" of holding them, but they are looking for something more.

A few years (or maybe even months) from now, we will look back at blocking SD like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. SD may be shady and abusive, but WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE BABY! Personal feelings and vendettas about inappropriate uses of the blockchain are going to look really silly when serious volume and attacks are unleashed at a dizzying pace in this exponential growth environment.

The 2013 exponential has us at $50 within two weeks and $100 by the end of April. So far we've held remarkably close to the curve, and even this recent surge was just reverting to the exponential norm (it had been lagging a bit).

Yup. All the recent price action looks yawnworthy on a log-scale chart.

Already predicted two weeks ago.

Namecheap

XTC sounds bad for obvious reasons. BTC is most familiar to us but it hardly matters for mainstream adoption. XBT sounds best. Or BIT if we can buy that one away.