Mike Hearn - Sorry if this feels like a redundant question, or that it's decreasing the signal to noise ratio here in any way.  I suppose at it's base it's not really an answerable question: what's the future of bitcoin?  We'll have to see.

What's interesting is that there seem to be two fairly strongly divergent viewpoints on this matter: some people assume the transaction network will continue to grow to rival paypal or even credit cards, and see the block size limit as an unimportant detail that will be quickly changed when needed.  Others see the limit as a fundamental requirement, or even dogma, of the bitcoin project, and view the long term network as mainly an international high-value payment system, or the backing of derivative currencies.  Both views seem reasonable, yet mutually exclusive.

I don't see this kind of disagreement with other often-brought up and redundant issues, such as "satoshi's aren't small enough", "people losing coins means eventually there won't be anything left" and so on.  Those aren't real problems.  I'm not saying the 1MB limit is a "problem" though, I just want to know what people are going to do, and what's going to happen.  Regardless of anyone's opinion on the issue, given the large number of people using bitcoin, the ease with which the change can be made, and the impending demand for more transactions, someone will compile a client with a larger block limit.  What if people want to start using it?

I can see this issue limit bitcoin acceptance as a payment for websites: why go to all the trouble of implementing high a high security bitcoin processing system for your e-commerce site if in a couple years bitcoin won't be usable for small transactions?  Maybe it will in fact scale up, but without any clear path for how that would happen, many will choose to wait on bitcoin and see what evolves rather than adopt it for their organization.

Sorry if I'm being dense -- from the wiki this is indeed classified as "Probably not a problem", and if some developers come on here and told me, "Quiet, you, it's being worked on," I would concede the point to them.  To me though the uncertainty itself of whether the 1MB limit will remain gives me pause.  The threads from 3 years ago debating the same topic perhaps make this conversation redundant, but don't settle the issue for me: this was a tricky problem 3 years ago, and is still.  The only thing that's changed with regard to the block size is that we're getting ever closer to hitting the limit.

Perhaps this is a conversation we'll just need to have in a year or so when the blocks are saturated.