Come on, the consolidation of mining operations, and therefore a handful of "people" controlling the blockchain will happen regardless of transaction throughput size. It's an economies of scale fact. As it becomes harder to mine the independent miners will wash out leaving only the biggest of operations conducting the work at a profitable pace. The only thing slowing down this eventuality is the price appreciation of bitcoin.
I am not against bigger blocks, but not at the cost of bitcoin network being controlled by a single entity or a couple of individuals.
1. Manufacturer of mining equipments want to control the network. Can it be more centralized?
2. There was ghash pool that hit 51%, and there is Chinese mining cartel with more than 51% combined.
3. Chinese government isn't in favour of bitcoin, a centralized decision to ban bitcoin in China would end up in taking down half of the decentralized bitcoin network.
Spam attacks, threatening the community because you own half of the network, is this the way to find a scalable solution?
Increasing block size is just a temporary solution. LN, sidechain/drivechain, extension blocks is a necessity if bitcoin needs to be used as an appropriate medium of exchange.
Can you please explain to us why this is a temporary solution? If extension blocks are ultimately needed then we should just make the transfer to that end.
Yeah, a major portion of bitcoin mining would get restricted to a particular country or an organization, as far as they are mining, no problem, but when they start using their mining majority to enforce their propaganda on the community, it is a problem.
LN would make transactions instant with the lowest fee. With bigger blocks, you order a coffee, drink, wait for the transaction to get confirmed, pay. With LN, you order a coffee, confirmed, pay, and drink. Just an example of not online, but how offline merchant payments would become a lot more feasible.
Which wallet do you use? Around 145 GB to synchronize blockchain. Obviously if bitcoin gets adopted on a large scale, the above figure wouldn't be limited to three digits. Increased block size, on chain transactions would get confirmed quickly with less congestion, but the network is always growing. The purpose of bitcoin is instant worldwide transaction with lowest fee, a side solution needs to be integrated into the network for this, that's what I meant by bigger block size isn't enough.
Segwit 2 MB, Segwit2x 4-8 MB. Right now remove spam dust transactions and 2 MB is more than enough for transactions to get confirmed, implement side options, bitcoin users would have the freedom to choose what method of transaction they want to use. Fork the network, users don't have a choice. It's as simple as that.