Satoshi never used IRC,
and he rarely explained his motivations for anything. In this case, he kept the change secret and told people who discovered it to keep it quiet until it was over with so that controversy or attackers wouldnt cause havok with the ongoing rule change
.I think that he was just trying to solve an obvious denial-of-service attack vector. He wasnt thinking about the future of the network very much except to acknowledge that the limit could be raised if necessary. The network clearly couldnt support larger blocks at that time, and nowadays we know that the software wasnt even capable of handling 1 MB blocks properly. Satoshi once told me, I think most P2P networks, and websites for that matter, are vulnerable to an endless number of DoS attacks. The best we can realistically do is limit the worst cases. I think he viewed the 1 MB limit as just blocking yet another serious DoS attack
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Satoshi is gone now, so itll be the developers who set the larger limit. But it has been determined by the majority of the Bitcoin Core developers (and the majority of Bitcoin experts in general) that the network cannot actually safely handle significantly larger blocks, so it wont be done right now. And the economy has the final say, of course, not the developers.
Its a moot point really. We dont need bitcoins anyway...
You don't need to hold Bitcoins to use Bitcoin's blockchain; you only must spend enough to use the blockchain as an immutable ledger (ie, it's tech for hire).