In theory, none of this should be a problem. The Lightning Network builds on top of the block chain but needs only fairly trivial upgrades to it for best functioning. So people who would like to explore this direction are free to do so. If what they built worked better than plain vanilla Bitcoin then the market should prefer payments being made that way, and if so … fair play to them! Bitcoin’s current design is unlikely to be the last word in making payments. It’s reasonable to think that one day it will be outcompeted or augmented by something else.
But the system we have today works. It has an ecosystem, it has developers. It has exchanges and wallets and people buying and selling and ATMs and books and apps and conferences and a large base of people who have learned how it works.
Would people decide to migrate to a radically different system, if given a free choice?
We don’t know, and the people pushing for these things don’t want to let the market decide. This is what’s gone wrong.
A long time ago, Satoshi put in place a temporary kludge: he limited the size of each block to one megabyte. He did this in order to keep the block chain small in the early days, until what we now call SPV wallets were built (‘client only mode’). As seen in the quote above, it was never meant to be permanent and he talked about phasing it out when the time came. In the end it wasn’t needed — I wrote the first SPV implementation in 2011 and with my esteemed colleague Andreas Schildbach, together we built the first and still most popular Android wallet. Since then SPV wallets have been made for every platform. So Satoshi’s reason for the temporary limit has been resolved a long time ago.
