I had similar panic concerns fluxer 
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=9539.msg124040#msg124040
To be the winner right now though is all about getting the best talent & marketing. Good devs are clearly worth their weight in gold. I think dilution is the best solution for BitShares. There has also been some limits placed on the dilution.
I do worry that if the market views BitShares as partly centralised already, then I think our valuation is going to be significantly handicapped as a result even in the short term so it's also something I've been keen to address by encouraging more voting as well as not keeping too much BTSX on the big exchanges.
Setting aside the fact that BitShares is far more effectively decentralized than most of its true competitors, that is of little concern. We are also more decentralized than most companies people routinely do business with. The demographic we will market to first does not generally care about this any more than they stop to consider the share distribution of Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, or Benny's Car Parts Outlet.
Yeah I can see you guys are envisioning people using a variety of front end applications and the fact that it's BitShares on the back end & how it works may be largely irrelevant to them. Personally I think the main market will be BitAssets. I think the brand image of BitShares, particularly the level of perceived decentralisation could be important.
On the shareholder side, if you're perceived to have centralised weaknesses and/or are ever operating in grey areas then they may value BitShares on a very short earnings horizon vs. a competitor that was perceived to be more decentralised, who could therefore achieve a higher valuation and raise more funds via dilution as a result.
BitShares is pretty decentralised though, and I'm really about encouraging more active voting stake and less on big exchanges than anything else.
If one goes out and approaches 20 random people on the street today and asks them if they are worried about the negative impact of centralization. I bet you the answer would be no.....they many have never even considered the implications. And for the few that answer in the affirmative, they would generally believe that there are no practical alternatives to the current status quo anyway. So the mass market is not clamoring for an alternate. In fact most have not identified the issue. In this case we in the crypto community are the advance guard.....the riders at the leading edge of the wave, if you will.
The market we are going after is not the crypomarket.........if all we do is capture the current crypto market this project would be a failure IMO. There is far more unrecognized demand out there, it is just a matter of the packaging and presentation of the product and getting our value proposition and story in focus . Since in the wider market the issues we here see as pressing - centralization of control and undue influence in the economic system- are not yet pressing concerns with clear alternatives (thought they are ever so slowly becoming so), we have time to get our decentralization framework right. I feel we are moving in this direction. However, we do not need to rush this transition due to fear of alienating the markets. The mass markets don't care about decentralization (as we here do). When WILL they care? It is really unknown and surely out of our control, but my opinion is that they will not start to really pay attention to the issue of centralization until this whole monetary system begins to swerve into the ditch (ala Cypress).
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