Satoshi did actually see those limits and discussed them in the early days on Metzdowd and Bitcointalk.org. But he covered his bases and allowed for both big data centers and/or layer 2 architectures to solve that problem. I’m don’t recall if he expressed a strong preference for one over the other, though.

Could you please point to me where Satoshi discussed using "layer 2 architectures" to handle the scaling problem? To my knowledge he always talked about scaling from the perspective of every transaction being published to the blockchain, because that's how the whole system works.

> It's interesting, so he didn't see the limits of the system. Scaling tx/s is easy, scaling it without increasing block verification time and cost is what's impossible.

Nonsense, he absolutely thought about scaling and in his head it was quite simple...because it was. You just need blocks big enough to allow the transaction throughput the world requires, but they need to be a finite size. That's all.

Not sure what you mean about "block verification time" having a scaling problem. It really doesn't.