To everyone else:
If you want a Bitcoin that is not absurdly expensive to use, and has the technical flexibility to achieve mass adoption, I encourage you to push for the hard fork.
What you think Satoshi "meant" is nowhere near as relevant as what Satoshi actually *did*.
It's even more relevant in the context of this debate. He put in a 1 MB anti-spam limit, yes. That doesn't mean it can never be changed. There have been hard forks before, and there will be again. He intended it for to be changed, and we know that, because he communicated the intent. The plan, from the outset, was blocks to eventually get bigger than 1 MB. The limit was to protect against spam, not to limit legitimate transaction data to 1 MB.
If you have a problem that resides entirely in your head, for which you apply arbitrary constraints to solutions that would otherwise be perfectly valid and practical, it is no wonder you're going to come up with "solutions" that sound like a load of garbage.
All problems reside in someone's head, including your problem with larger blocks. A problem is subjective. I have a problem with Bitcoin relying on off-chain solutions for almost all of its scalability because I believe they are not as secure or distributed as Bitcoin main. If they were, we could reduce the block size limit to 1 kb and simply substitute the rest of the space with off-chain solutions. But they are inferior substitutes, and hence we prefer not reducing the space available for transactions on Bitcoin main. Similarly, we should, as Satoshi intended, raise the block size to permit more legitimate transactions.
not the Bitcoin I want
There are two things, the Bitcoin "you want", and the Bitcoin that actually exists.
Bitcoin will change over time, regardless of whether the hard fork happens. I want it to change to allow affordable main chain transactions, and not to force people to use off-chain solutions, and pay $30 fees to use the main chain. I also don't want to risk a scenario where people opt to use a copycat altcoin simply because it's so much cheaper.
As for your point that the protocol has a 1 MB block limit in place right now: yes thank you for informing me. The protocol can change. There is nothing stopping people from hard forking it.
And only one of them will eventually, and perhaps painfully, have to adapt to the other, my money's on reality.
The reality is that a hard fork is possible, your disingenuous arguments notwithstanding.
Since you seem keen on historical data I'll point out to you that none of the technically superior alt coins actually ever mattered, market-cap wise.
Bitcoin has never been faced with an extended period of time when its blocks were full. That means we don't know if altcoins will suddenly take market share in the event that blocks start hitting the 1 MB limit on a regular basis. Your argument is therefore, with all due respect, another case of you being disingenuous in this debate.
OTOH if it's absurdly expensive to use, it'll very probably be absurdly valuable to own.
I'd rather a Bitcoin that is both absurdly valuable, and cheap to use, because of high transaction volumes and adoption rates.