I hope -and I'm relatively certain- that I will be (still!) able to do that in the future and imho any solution away from allowing a lot of cheap and fast transactions on the blockchain will be a major threat to bitcoins integrity. I know that "off the chain" transactions are hip these days, but imho this takes away a huge and major feature of bitcoin, NO intermediaries. This point can not be stressed enough. Taking away any kind of intermediary between people is one of the big pluses of bitcoin.
I don't want bitcoin companies between me and the bitcoin network, I want to participate in the network itself. I could just keeping my credit cards then.
Imho off the chain transactions are no solution at all, they are a way of complicating things.
Off-chain transactions for small or micro payments does not forbid you to send money to a friend of yours directly (through the blockchain - you may just have to pay a relatively high fee).
The problem is that one thing if what we want, another thing is what we actually CAN have. World is made of constraints. You just cannot record everything, but in any case why would you do that? I don't care if my coffee transaction does not get into the block chain (as a single transaction). Intermediares that lower the required fees and speed up transaction times are just good.
Consider that such intermediares (that I call payment gateways) could even increase user privacy, by aggregating several small transactions into a big one where the information about the component transactions is lost.
Best regards,
ilpirata79