Quote from: adamstgBit on September 15, 2015, 04:31:04 PM

maybe you should tell all merchants who use bitpay to process and convert BTC payments they are at risk of being cheated.

you're being overly paranoid, and your ivory tower is really high.

Of course they are at risk. There is always a risk.

Bitcoin is made to be decentralized, apolitical, trustless.

Bigger block advocates often try to support that that Satoshi would be with them.
"Satoshi introduced the initial 1mb block limit as a measure to prevent spam.
He intended to remove it in the future and leave the market do its magic."

I won't tell you what he wanted, but I will only point on his initial paper and judge yourself.

Before reading, please ask youreself; Do you consider bitpay and coinbase "financial institutions" ??
If so, this will trouble you.

Quote from: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf Satoshi Nakamoto Bitcoin Paper

Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main
benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending.
We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network.
The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of
hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing
the proof-of-work. The longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of
events witnessed, but proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power. As
long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to
attack the network, they'll generate the longest chain and outpace attackers. The
network itself requires minimal structure. Messages are broadcast on a best effort
basis, and nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the longest
proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone.

I would like to see bitcoin scaling to thousands of transactions per second, but not at the cost of any bit further centralization.
Bitcoin is apolitical, trustless, decentalised money. Any aberration would mark it as failed.
If you don't have a problem with relying on a third party financial institution/processor you can very well use paypal.
Be sure to check how reputable the US gov is, backing the dollar.