As I see it there are 2 main competing philosophies for Bitcoin. 1. Digital Gold. Pseudo anonymous value storage that can't be tampered with by third parties.

As I see it there are 2 main competing philosophies for Bitcoin. 1. Digital Gold. Pseudo anonymous value storage that can't be tampered with by third parties. 2. A payment network with transaction levels that match Visa. It appears the 2 are not compatible. For 1 we need more nodes, and node counts from my understanding are on the way down. For 2 we need to increase the blocksize, but this might decrease the number of people willing to run nodes. I think we have to look at the way we use Bitcoin today, after all the experiment has been running for a few years now. I don't know anyone who is using Bitcoin for day to day spending. But I do know people who are using it as an investment or for value storage. So in my view the market has decided. The miners have also decided. They were offered a solution with increased blocksize and they voted no. That's consensus.