Since bitcoin isn't a company that might sue me for copyright or trademark, can I sell items with the bitcoin logo on them?  Same goes for all the others like Ethereum, litecoin, etc.  Does the fact that these are decentralized allow me to sell stuff using those names?

Ok that makes sense now, thanks so much for the detailed response.  So, aren't there many other Bitcoin forks that random people create just by copying the code and changing something?  Does this happen all the time and we just don't hear about it? 

A hard fork always causes a chain to split into two.  Who actually creates the new chain and how?  Is this just the development community?  How can a minority of the devs create a new coin if consensus is required to change the protocol?

Thanks, what do you mean by a fork of electrum?  I thought it was only blockchains that fork, are you saying wallets can too or how does that work?

Hey crusadoxm, same boat here, I've had btc in electrum and want to move it to bittrex or another exchange but it seems risky if there is no known procedure yet for claiming the btg in electrum.  Doesn't seem like a sure thing if electrum hasn't publicly said that they will be supporting btg.  It's a btc only wallet.

What if we move btc from electrum to a different wallet or exchange right now?  I know we'd still be entitled to BTG since we have access to our private key but do you think it would still complicate things?  I'd like to move my btc from electrum to bittrex but I'm not certain it's safe to do that right now if there's a chance I could lose the BTG.

All these public companies run centralized businesses.  If blockchain technology is adopted, won't they all eventually go out of business to be replaced with decentralized systems that run on the blockchain?