crumbs - you prefer decentralization, since it is the Unique feature of bitcoin.

hayek - you dont mind if bitcoin is becoming centralized, since it is the natural way for all industrial development, where an industry becomes more specialized, effiecient and concentrated in the hands of a few corporations

Both of you are right from your respective perspective.

For me, bitcoin's "Unique Selling Point" was: Anonimity and Decentralization.
But now bitcoin feels less anonymous than my VISA-card, and is becoming as centralzied as the banking system (SWIFT).
So why should I bother using bitcoin instead of VISA when I don't get the original features of bitcoin?

Thank you for proving my pointthread

This is just FUD.

...
Now the concern is longer term.  Imagine its 3-5 years down the road.
Rows of data center racks lined with blades chock full of 14nm
hashcash mining cores.  A danger I see is that manufacturers have an
interest to hoard as long as bitcoin price supports a high profit with
next gen hardware compared to what is available to others.  So the big
boys (and I mean financial houses, venture capitalists, kind of level)
will be best placed to be able to buy their way into the line at TMSC,
front millions in design, pre-order fees, circuit board design.  The
risk is p2p miners arent going to be able to get access to equipment
that can financially compete with this equipment.  Butterfly seems like
a small player - maybe they'll ship.  But what can be done with the
above scale could eclipse their power and efficiency, probably in the
same way ASIC outclasses GPUs and I can see market reasons why
you or I wont be able to buy them.

Now some people might think so what - all's fair in a moore's law arms
race - thats part of the design.  And to some extent thats right.
Bitcoin could do fine like that, but it wont be a p2p currency any
more, not really.  That's because if all the peers are big stock market
listed companies, with corporate lawyers, very statically and easily
identifiable, they will do whatever governments tell them to do.  And
governments will tell them to convert the network into swift 2.0
including government feeds for analysis (yes bitcoin is public anyway,
but not to your legally required truename etc), and legal requests to
block this and that payment entity change the protocol by fiat etc. to
roll back transactions because of some fraud or dispute unrelated to
bitcoin, to freeze and confiscate bitcoins - we'll be back to square one.

...

Not sure if you're responding to my quote, which is stripped from its context -- it was a reply to heyek's claim that "mining is cheaper than ever."
Mining is cheaper than ever if you denominate it in GH/s per BTC spent.  If you, OTOH, wish to mine at a profit, the picture changes

Mining is not decentralized, when 3-4 people control >50% of network hash power.

ASIC miners in the hands of the masses mean nothing, when they abdicate their power by mining at a centralized pool rather than p2pool.

Bitcoin was a nice experiment of a decentralized currency,
but now it is becoming more and more like the traditional banking system,
less decentralized and more in the control of a few entities.

We see already that the blockchain is to huge for most users so they won't bother with using the bitcoin-client.
Instead most people will use bitcoin wallets in the cloud, and the real bitcoin clients will be run mostly by corporations, not by consumers.

The same goes with mining, it is not profitable anymore for you to mine coins at home, it must be done with ASIC and in a large scale to be profitable over time.

So the bitcoin infrastructure will become like fiat:
-The currency is issued by the banks ( bitcoins mined by a few mining corporations)
-The SWIFT backbone is run by the banks (bitcoin clients and mining run by a few corporations)

The only advantage of bitcoin is that everyone has the RIGHT to mine the currency or run the backbone (bitcoin client), but most users wont care about those rights.

So?

The only way everyone could make BTC would be if infinite BTC would be crated each day. But then they would be worthless.

If miners mine at a loss some shut down until it's profitable for the remaining ones again. Still has nothing to do with decentralization.

And we already had this. If it becomes unprofitable the large ones will be forced to shut down due to their running expenses. While the small hobbits can continue.

You arguments against this account for competitive advantages that one (big) operation can realize against another.

Except the own chips argument, the arguments don't account for small operations

2. Big operations have additional expenses to handle waste heat and inventory that easily account for any el. cost advantages.

3. Thanks to headcount cost the hobbies don't have.

The chips argument crumbles due to the fact that chips only suppliers will be forced to sell their chips cheaper and cheaper until any cost advantage is lost.

If Hax0r B0b doesn't add his AC costs to his tally, doesn't' mean they're not much greater, per GH, than those of large mining farms.  They are.

Thus far, chip manufacturers have successfully mined their chips, while selling to the "hobbyists" at quite a nice markup  So nice, in fact, that the majority of ASICs purchased are proving to be unprofitable to the "hobbyists."

With all the buthurt aimed at BFL & Avalon, one could mistakenly assume that the "hobbyists" expected to make money from their "hobby."

If you don't put much stock into logical arguments, look around you -- GHash.io is a good example.