Quote from: arcticlava on March 15, 2016, 07:20:43 AM

If a hostile government halted bitcoin mining in any country, wouldn't this just make mining more profitable for miners everywhere else, and shift the consensus to them? It sounds to me like that would be a good thing.

Technically yes. However, if they took down all the mining in China at once we would have to go through a somewhat difficult period until the difficulty adjusts. After this, the network would be fine.

Quote from: arcticlava on March 15, 2016, 06:10:55 AM

If the block size is kept the same, or pushed downward, then fees increase, and low cost transactions are forced to move off chain, and there are centralization risks. (Examples: BlockStream, Lightning Network service provider).

This is better because people are still able to support the network themselves and agree to rules by running nodes. There is nothing wrong the second layer; besides LN should/can be decentralized.

Quote from: nikelad on March 15, 2016, 06:27:20 AM

We really nee some extent of tradeoff, or some party need to compromise his ideas for the sake of the bitcoin's ecosystem.

The capacity is being increased with Segwit. No compromise is needed at the moment. A block size increase might come after it though.