So really all I know is that they intended to "scale" by increasing the blocksize. ... Has anything changed? Are they proposing realistic alternatives to lightning for scaling? Are there new developments that I should be aware of?
0 confirmation transactions. No, seriously - that's the amazing and innovative feature bcash has implemented to try to compete with lightning.
For the time being, mostly blocksize. As blocksize is all that is needed at this stage.
The BCH community, however, did demonstrate conclusively that:
- generic home computer HW on consumer broadband running bitcoind can handle ~100 tx/s
- above ~100 tx/s there is still plenty of CPU BW
- a fix to bitcoind's naive threading model increases performance
- bitcoind with fixed threading on same HW & net can handle ~500 tx/s
The BCH community is doing the work of re-enabling a host of opcodes that were thrown overboard years ago before any real analysis was performed upon them. Oh, I guess that's not scaling.
Of course, it was that same community (though pre-fork) that first implemented Xthin, which reduces network bandwidth consumption by nearly 2x.
There is discussion of adopting Lightning. Not much traction for that. There's orders of magnitude that can be gained by a simple blocksize change first.
CPU overhead was never too much of an issue. Network bandwidth and storage capacity are the larger problems.
If big blocks are the answer, lets see the large scale experiments with 1GB blocks operating on testnet with hundreds or thousands of simultaneous users conducting enough transactions to fill the blocks to near capacity.