Bitcoin continues to outpace all altcoins no matter what they've promised. and that's despite Bitcoin's 1MB limit.
Because it hasn't become an issue yet.
But ultimately if Bitcoin isn't the best medium of exchange it won't be a store of value.
"Store of value" is an emergent property of a good medium of exchange. It's not something that can be separated as if it were independent.
I haven't given this too much thought yet, but after seeing the document on "Rapidly Adjusted Micropayments to a Predetermined Party", it sure sounded like an off-chain solution to me.
It's just that the solution given in the article was a specific use case, I couldn't see any reason it could not be made generic to include more than two parties, and and adjustment period of however long you want.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts#Example_7:_Rapidly-adjusted_.28micro.29payments_to_a_pre-determined_partyFor example, seems plausible you could implement changetip.com's off-chain ledger using this. Each user might need 2 channels, since tips are not monotonically increasing (you might send a tip too).
Isn't the whole point of being "off chain" is that you know certain parts of the transaction graph are isolated from the rest, and that you can simply reduce them using some other mechanism and just transmit the final result to the bitcoin network? That seems like exactly what the above document describes.
Edit: ah, the article says you can adjust both ways if nLockTime'd transactions can now enter the memory pool. I don't know if that's enabled now or not. I think I read that locktime works but replacement does not.