Is it worth self-exile from TOR and other low-bandwith networks just so Bitcoin can attempt to track every coffee bean/bus ticket and be a single point of failure for all transactions great and small?
Two points:
1. Bitcoin needs much larger blocks to simply act as a bank-wire replacement. Forget buying coffees. Please read DeathandTaxes' analysis:
Permanently keeping the 1MB (anti-spam) restriction is a great idea ...Can we stop talking about a cup of coffee please?
You may have heard someone say something like "Every $5 starbucks coffee doesn't need to be on the blockchain so there is no need to raise the limit". The implied message is that while the cost of the limit is that trivial purchases will be knocked off chain you will still have direct access to the blockchain for everything else, but the 1MB restriction puts such a chokehold on transaction capacity that even larger more meaningful transactions will eventually be knocked off as well.
2. I would rather full nodes not be able to use TOR, than end users have to use large financial intermediaries to access the Bitcoin blockchain more often than once a decade. Please read DeathAndTaxes' analysis linked above.
I've already read D&T's analysis.
I don't propose Bitcoin replace Starbucks cards, much less bank-wires.
I support the paradigm of Bitcoin as a new kind of 'super-gold' that creates its own category on the spectrum, supplanting all previous forms of money:
coins
I also share the ideal of end users minimizing or excluding trust via their own full nodes direct access to a blockchain.
Those nodes and their blockchains do not have to be Bitcoin's. That is the mistake the hubris-filled Maximalist camp makes.
There are at least three other blockchains available which are well suited to handle the small (Cryptonite), medium (Litecoin), and private (Monero) transactions.
If Bitcoin insists on being all things to all people everywhere and forever (excluding TOR and other low-bandwidth connections), it will dramatically fork into a payment system (20MBcoin) and store of value (1MBcoin).