In my opinion, there has to be some tradeoff. As of right now, going completely decentralized is impossible due to the following reasons:

- People need some kind of protection in case their crypto is lost or stolen.
- Smart contracts are an amazing solution - but what do you do in case of a dispute? You need a human element.
- Tech is not perfect. Smart contracts work very well - until there's a bug.

The best way to deal with these problems is to add additional layers on top of the blockchain, some being tech layers and some being social, human to human layers.

At Safebit, we are solving this problem by providing an applications layer that can offer Safebit wallet users various insurance and arbitration tools that will be able to help them out in case of a dispute/loss/theft. That's probably the best way to close the gaps today.

This definitely prevents complete decentralization, but we will not have complete decentralization until we get sufficiently advanced AI to manage our disputes for us.

To answer your question head-on, I, like Satoshi, think that the blockchain can scale as-is.

Moving over to PoS, sharding, and other methods may be helpful, but our storage, bandwidth, memory, and performance are all growing well enough to make it work.

Andreas Antonopoulos had an interesting talk on this subject in 2016, where he referenced the fact that scalability debates ("can it scale?") are as old as the internet. Back in 92, people didn't think the internet could scale for websites and email attachments. As we all know, that's not the case anymore.