Today we are not reliant on third parties to transact on the Bitcoin blockchain directly and cheaply.
Your lack a lot of knowledge. The majority of people rely on third parties today. Anyone who does not use a full node (e.g. online wallets) relies on a third party. Online wallets are the worst though, users don't even have access to any private keys. Increasing the block size limit makes it harder not to rely on third parties.
I think it is the other way around, not increasing the blocksize makes it harder not to rely on third parties, at least with SPV wallets we do still regain control of our private keys. Not increasing the blocksize leads to much higher transaction costs while making transacting directly on the Bitcoin network also much more unreliable. Increasing the blocksize leads to a marginal increase in the cost of running a full node, especially with the increase we are discussing here to two megabyte is unlikely to have a significant effect on node count. I think increased adoption will actually help with the node count and an increased blocksize helps facilitate that.
This would also take transaction fees away from the miners.
No.
I think this is a fact, by lumping transactions together less fees need to be payed overall. This is one of the fundemental principles behind the lighting network after all.
I have nothing against the lighting network, even if it ends up being highly centralized.
You do.
I have nothing against the lighting network as long as it is not used as a reason to restrict the main Bitcoin blockchain. I think we should scale Bitcoin directly and if people still choose to use the lighting network instead then that is fine, then we would not need to increase the blocksize again. That is different to making the decision now for everyone what they should use by restricting the blocksize, allowing the people and the market to choose for themselves I think is the better solution, and in reality is exactly what will happen.
However it should not be regarded as a replacement for the every day transactions we do on the Bitcoin blockchain today.
Creating a second layer does not replace anything, it supplements the system. Should I tell you how the internet functions on 7 layers and probably never would properly function on 1?
I do not think that layer one of the internet was unnecessarily and arbitrarily restricted in order to strengthen the other layers. Furthermore layer one, so to speak still remains the most important and most used part of the internet.
I suppose if we moved most of the transactions off chain that would be true.
There's no correlation between his statement and off-chain transactions.
These statements absolutely do have a correlation by moving transactions off chain we are depriving miners from potential fees.
However if we do scale Bitcoin by increasing the blocksize I see the mining power of the network continue to grow as its value grows providing greater security for the entire network.
Or the network experiences more centralization, higher orphan rates and possibly an attack. Stop looking at the 'best case' scenarios, we need to be prepared for the worst ones deal with tricky situations.
And you should stop fear mongering, increasing the blocksize to two megabyte will not be catastrophic in anyway. That you are even mentioning orphan rates at two megabytes is ridiculous and just reveals that you do not have any proper criticisms of such an increase, its not like segwit in all of its complexity presents less risk?