They want your company name and address, and your merchant tax ID. Unless you're running a scam, that should not be a problem. That information should be on your web site. In some US states, and in the EU, it's a criminal offense to accept online payments without disclosing the actual name and address from which the business is conducted.

Nobody hosts anything serious on GoDaddy.

Late enough that the bubble has already popped.

We're halfway to the next difficulty adjustment, and the green line (difficulty if it was adjusted right now) is still below the red line (current difficulty). (The grey line (recent hash rate) is climbing again, though.) So we're on track for a decline in difficulty, or at most a small increase.

Of course. If you don't get this, you're one of the suckers.

Of course. Bitcoin is a zero-sum game. Bitcoin doesn't generate any revenue or produce anything. For every win, someone else loses.

Speculators are the distraction. Bitcoin was supposed to be a petty-cash system for the Internet. That's happening.

The price of Bitcoin has leveled out, and the difficulty is now leveling out. Merchant adoption is up. Bitcoin is getting used for its intended purpose. It's starting to behave like a useful tool rather than a get-rich-quick scheme.

Read the actual FTC filing. One thing is very clear - the FTC enforcers understand Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining quite well. They're very clear on how the value of equipment decreases over time. The FTC filing indicates that not only was BFL doing all the bad stuff people were complaining about on Bitcointalk, they were doing it on purpose:

"Up until the time the FTC executed the TRO, Defendants were using customer equipment to line their own pockets despite public representations to the contrary. Further, the illegal conduct here did not occur in isolation or as a result of mere oversight, but as a result of a business model intentionally designed to extract and retain money from consumers as long as possible. Defendants have already done this once – they started taking consumers’ money for their second generation machine, the Monarch, when their first generation customers were still angrily waiting for their delivery. Also telling, rather than exhibiting contrition about their failure to fulfill promises to consumers, Defendants continued taking pre-orders despite their inability to fulfill existing orders and spent corporate funds on foam pitchforks emblazoned with the phrase, “Y U No Ship,BFL Is Late!” for conceivably no other reason than to mock their own customers."

It's "petrified". Anyway, that's a very real issue. The Fed has been holding interest rates down by flooding the banking system with money. Classically, we should have had either inflation or an interest rate spike by now, but neither has happened.

The profitability of mining does not drive the price. Nor does the difficulty. Difficulty has gone to the moon while the price has gone nowhere.

Halving the block reward will halve the profitability of miners. There will be less miners.  Since everybody knows this event is coming, and when, mining farms will time their equipment purchases so that they will reach end of profitable life at the halving.

Hash rate, recent weeks.

The cost numbers have been indicating that it's time for some miners to drop out, and that seems to be happening.

If the green line stays below the red line, the difficulty will drop at the next adjustment.

Funny, the opposite seems to be happening. There are now more ways to do transactions in Bitcoin.  More shopping cart systems, even PayPal, are accepting Bitcoin. It's finally being used for routine transactions. This seems to have little influence on the price, because the people using Bitcoin for transactions don't hold it for long. Merchants dump it to Coinbase in seconds, and Coinbase then dumps it on an exchange.

As a store of value, Bitcoin sucks. Huge volatility and a declining price.

Circle makes big announcement, price goes down.

It seems that every time someone makes an announcement of something that makes it easier to spend Bitcoins, the price goes down.

I get it. Paypal hates that credit card companies, by law, have to give consumers rights that PayPal doesn't. Bitcoin makes it easier for Paypal to screw you.

The Winkelvoss EFT is a dump. They bought a lot of Bitcoins and can't unload them without crashing the market. The EFT is a way for them to exit Bitcoin.

"Fiat ROI" is what it's all about.  Speculation and mining are different businesses. One party can do both, but you have to account for them separately or you're deluding yourself.

How many Bitcoins exist that have been involved in a transaction in the last two or three years?

The Robocoin ATM at Hacker Dojo has a 15% spread and a 5% fee. 

See some of the older discussions on "walls". Exchanges often show huge buy or sell orders a short distance from the current price. But when the price moves, so do those "walls".

The high cost and slow confirmation for small transactions is a big problem. Bitcoin ought to be the petty cash of the Internet, used for music tracks, in-game items, apps, and similar transactions in the $0.25 to $2.50 range. That hasn't happened.  This is a lack, because the Internet could use a petty cash system for small, casual purchases. There have been a number of centralized systems that tried: Beenz, CyberCoin, Facebook Credits, Microsoft Points, etc. All failed. Non-portable money is a pain.

There may be a successor to Bitcoin that scales better for small transactions. No sign of one yet, though.

(Yes, I've heard the "It's OK to accept unconfirmed transactions" line. Nah. If you do that, based on the track record of scams in the Bitcoin world, somebody will screw you.)