Jeff and Gavin's statement recently:

"However, in the short term, we have a disappointing situation where a subset of dev consensus is disconnected from the oft-mentioned desire to increase block size on the part of users, businesses, exchanges and miners. This reshapes bitcoin in ways full of philosophical and economic conflicts of interest. "

I'm more interested in the philosophical conflicts of interest here, unfortunately they did not mention what are they. I believe bitcoin's long term success will depends on its core philosophy

For example, everyone without permission can set up a full node and start to mine bitcoins (p2pool), thus become a part of a decentralized global banking system. It is this free of entry all the way into money creation attracted so many enthusiasts. So I think permission-less is the core philosophy of bitcoin

Following this philosophy, if you have too high barrier of entry (too high requirement on hardware and mining investment for individuals), then it is not a permission-less system any more

Similarly, everyone should be able to use the blockchain to do transactions without permission

So that is the conflict of interest here: If you want every one can setup a full node at home and mine bitcoins, then you should keep the block size small, thus not everyone will be able to use the blockchain to do transactions. There should be a balance between these two considerations

I just had another idea: If you setup a full node, then you can do transactions cheaply. Easy to explain, difficult to implement