I agree with your statement and analysis overall. Bitcoin tries to be very conservative. In the question of blocksize, keeping it small means more people can verify and that increases security. I dont think with current technology you can have fast cheap transactions that are secure and I like the decision to keep blocks small. The situation is a classical trilema, choose two out of security, speed and price. You cant have all. But I also like that there are others that have bigger blocks. We are still experimenting very much and diversity is great.
Maybe bitcoins approach is not the winning idea, but maybe other chains will suffer attacks in the future that are not possible in bitcoin and people realise that we need as many nodes as possible.
On many other topics we do not have such a trilemma and huge advances in user experience are possible. I think the problem is that the btc people are very theoretical and dont have the skills to deliver good user experience. People that are designing UI on the other hand dont know how to participate. There is a lot of opportunity, but it is difficult to make money and enter that space.
It does increase security, but I do think that Bitcoiners are obsessed with security. It wasn't that long ago that banks ran on a simple double ledger system, where the bank had a ledger and you had a copy in your chequebook. By today's standards, I'd say that's clearly not secure enough. But I'd also say Juan's statement about everyone being able to verify the blockchain on their home computer is going too far - it's limiting the blockchain to the slowest runners in the race. It would be like a video editor developer saying they're going to make sure their software runs on the least powerful device, thereby sacrificing all the benefits of specialisation.
Thanks for your respectful and thought-provoking comments, they're much appreciated.
That bc Bitcoin does not plan to scale by it main layer.
Specialization is decentralization. It will happen to any system but the key it to make it low.