Bitcoin is literally at a fork. One path leads to super-gold, the other leads to yet another forgettable/replaceable retail token.
Why "forgettable/replaceable retail token"? You could just as easily have said "spendable super gold".
I think that the promise of Bitcoin is, at its core, disintermediation (transfer to anyone, anywhere, nearly instantly). This is where it gains its intrinsic value which then supports the value holders put on it by holding. But if it costs too much for individuals to make transactions, then txns must be posted through intermediaries who as Circle/Coinbase have shown are susceptible to all the problems with today's banking system. "Welcome the new boss same as the old boss".
Sidechains could solve some of that problem which is why it is interesting to consider them alongside the block size; I suppose we could have sidechains for daily spending and Bitcoin could be essentially be your super-gold "savings account". A carefully designed sidechain would still achieve disintermediation. But money flow between sidechains and Bitcoin will not be quick so it would not be and ideal situation, and is still not achieveable with 1MB block sizes.
So I think we should accept Gavin's scalability plan, and guess what? its not set in stone. If it scales faster than the available hardware, we can always change it.
Really, the crux of the argument for me is this:
The worst case with the scalability plan is that individuals can't in practice be full nodes, but can STILL hold BTC in local wallets and spend them.
The worst case without scalability is that individuals must trust intermediaries to hold their BTC because a single txn is so expensive it must be aggregated -- i.e. the same banking system we have today.
(none of the awesome functionality like multi-sig "custodial" accounts can be used (on a per customer basis); they all require a transaction to unlock the funds which would be too expensive to do per customer)
We need to get this right the first time. One does not simply "always change it." Otherwise hard forks would be called 'easy forks.'
When TOR and other slow/hardened connections are excluded by GavinBlocks, users must then trust their ISP/.gov/etc. to not snoop on or throttle/banhammer their nodes. This creates intolerable intermediaries at the network layer, which destroys the basis for BTC's antifragility and thus its unique/intrinsic store-of-value function.
We can't ignore the trade off between retail suitability and super-gold fitness. Trade-offs, like diminishing marginal returns, are economic law.
Some of us simply won't be able to afford Bitcoin when it assumes its rightful position as Gold 2.0. Let's accept that and move on, instead of rejiggering everything just to appease us pikers at great risk to the whales who do the heavy lifting to keep BTC viable and growing. If you can't afford regular gold now, what makes you think you have the right to expect affordable SuperGold?
Many of us will actively resist network degradation and less super-gold fitness in exchange for more retail noise accommodation and uncertainty about the impact of exponential blocksize growth. It's not just the initial 20MB Gavinblocks, it's the >>20MB Gigablocks that kick in relatively soon which concern those of us who care about the weakest links in the system's chain.
Individuals making low value tx don't have to trust Paymium or other off-chain intermediaries so long as plenty of capacity exists in 2nd tier altcoins' blockchains. Litecoin, for example, is secured by more than enough ASICs and GPUs to be perfectly acceptable for small and medium size daily retail consumer BS.
Let's also note that blockchain technology, by enabling unprecedented transparency and real time auditing, allows us to keep our off-chain overlords on a short leash. As Davout put it so succinctly:
The true value that Bitcoin brings to the table is not "everyone gets to write into the holy ledger", it is instead "everyone gets to benefit from sane and non-inflationary financial instutions whose sanity and honesty are ensured by the holy blockchain".
This is sig-worthy quote really gets to the crux of the 'retail token vs super-gold' fissure, and makes clear why the FUD of Fundamentalist Monopolists ("Thou shall have no other coins before Holy BTC, lest you be cast into the off-chain lake of fiat") is unfounded.