>I won't address the attacks on Roger Ver because it is my belief that attempts at turning a technical debate into politics should be met with contempt.
I mean, you just did, via this comment.
The BCH camp could have contributed their resources to helping Core come up with a long term solution. Any fork that doesn't offer real groundbreaking advances is just a distraction and should be shunned. Forks that are simple recompilations of the original Bitcoin with simple config changes to the blocksize and/or algo are power/greed plays.
While I think BCH is run by a bunch of nutjobs who are hellbent on doing unethical trash to ruin BTC, this isn't a fair criticism. Ver and others did try to help Bitcoin (I refuse to call it Core, it doesn't need a descriptor, Bcash does) through these methods, but BTC's developer pool is... something of a bunch of Internet arguers.
Roger Ver took his ball and went home. There's nothing wrong with that at all. He thinks he's right, and that's all well and good. What's not right is his ridiculous insistence that BCH is the real Bitcoin and the intentional methods to devalue BTC in conjunction with Jihan, and acting like a kid in public and social media going nuts.
Because it's a 99% pure fork of BTC, sure. Closer than the "original" Bitcoin? That's not possible to say.
>>philosophy
Subjective at best. Unless, you know, Craig Wright actually is Satoshi, since he's involved in BCH and has claimed to be him. In which case, it absolutely is.
>>community
Also subjective.
With that said, this certainly does not imply that p2p cash is what Bitcoin could actually excel at once it reach global scale. Modifying the original vision is not some great sin, it literally happens all the time with startups and no one bats an eye.
I don't think being closer to Satoshi's original vision is any important, Bitcoin is not a religion and Satoshi isn't a prophet.
The split-up was a good thing, I'm excited that different avenues are being explored. Maybe core maintainers are wrong and p2p cash is actually the way to go. Maybe Bitcoin Cash fans are wrong and the solution lies in developing L2 solutions. Maybe both are wrong. Time will tell and we should be happy that different things are being tried.
The engineer in me says that the "real" Bitcoin is the one with the most total difficulty. I think that definition is too narrow. To me, both are the real Bitcoin, just in different timelines. The timeline that wins will overwrite reality such that it was the real Bitcoin all along. Meta!
I think that argument is even stronger against lower block times because latency (network, validation, etc) rather than bandwidth contributes the most to block propagation delays.
Anyway, doesn’t it amount to the same thing? 2 MB every 10 minutes or 1 MB every 5 minutes, your node still has to do roughly the same amount of work to validate blocks.
This leaves a hard upper bound of 4MB block size, with a "typical" size of ~2.3MB if everyone uses SegWit.
So it's not meaningful to talk about a fixed block cap anymore. Perhaps it is better to talk about "typical" block sizes the way you do.
What's important is that the 1MB limit is history, unless you have to make legacy transactions for some reason.
It's a dead-simple idea. You increase the supply side of the fee market and users don't have to compete for transaction finality anymore. It has been implemented and we know it works.
Of course, that is only kicking the can down the road and has many caveats. It still has proven effective to complete its goal (minimize tx fees).
Lightning networks is a WIP that is months, perhaps years, away from hitting production. As such, I wouldn't call them the "main approach" to scaling except in the mind of core engineers. It might drive tx costs down, it might not, at this stage it is too early to tell for sure.
As such, I think OP is right. It is completely fair to say that block size increase is the "main" approach, as in the "the one that we know for sure works right now", to making Bitcoin usable as a payment system.
Now on a side note: I don't think you needed to be that aggressive with OP. I won't address the attacks on Roger Ver because it is my belief that attempts at turning a technical debate into politics should be met with contempt.