It is clear that the investment community will be obliged to diversify.  Bitcoin can go a long way on 1MB blocks and big (relatively) transaction fees; it appears SegWit is not gaining the support it needs to go through but who knows it may still make it; without SegWit can Lightning be made to work?  Which other altcoin is going to become the darling of scalability?  Or perhaps there will be many.  Or is there indeed some fatal flaw that always draws any of them into centralization?

It makes sense to the Blockstream group, because with a bigger block size the LN would not be necessary for a much longer time. If I was a cartoonist, I would have drawn a picture where the Blockstream guys were stepping on the Bitcoin guys throat and only allowed enough room for him to breath, without him dying from suffocation.

In the Blockstream guys hand is a oxygen cylinder called, "SegWit$$$Lightning Network" and in the little chat box, it will say.... " Pay or Die "

Indeed, they have been planned to increase block size, as far as I know from entities positions : https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy
There is no any other option if we expect for more adopters and transactions per second.
Time confirmation will become problem all the time for mass adoption if they don't do it, maybe this year or next year.

i disagree.
we need to increase the block size but things are not that bad if we only see legit transactions in the pool. right now we have a massive scale spam attack which is increasing the number of unconfirmed transactions.

https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/1776143.0

the thing about blockchain and bitcoin is that you can spam but you can't hide.

There has to be a way of stopping soam attacks without bloating the blockchain.

Increasing the blockchain makes just sense if you enlarge it 3 times but getting the capability of making 30x or 300x more transcactions, like with LN.

Ignorelist stupid.

Because monero has what 3 transactions max in a block? Public blockchain is the most important thing ever. It can avoid corruption if ised by government. We want be there and not on a hidden transaction layer missused by criminals and corruption, boy.

Yeah, I believe they wait to test segwit with lightcoin first, they don't want to risk bitcoin without confidence

Eh... spam attack or not, blocks are full... and fees are (too) high. Wasn't "cheap and fast" transactions one of the major advantages of bitcoin? Bitcoin is neither at the moment... The only thing it currently still has is decentralization, well sort of atleast... Increasing the block size isn't a permanent scaling solution IMO but it is the temporary one we NEED right now until LN arrives. People are running away from bitcoin and going into altcoins atm because they're cheaper and faster right now...

Who decides whether or not a transaction is "spam"? And even if it is spam, they do pay fees. The problem is: even with fees that would have been called very high just a few months ago, I'm now waiting almost 24 hours for my transaction. As a Bitcoin user I don't really care if "spam" is the cause, it should just work.
Sites like https://btc.com/stats/unconfirmed-tx or https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ nicely show you how much to pay for a fast transaction, but the end-result is we're all paying more, without processing a single transaction more.
The last 4 blocks all have more than 1 Bitcoin in fees, up to 1.7 Bitcoin. That's huge!

Remember when "cheap transactions" was an argument to use Bitcoin? To grow, it needs more users. To get more users, it needs to be able to handle them. Meanwhile, the miners have a 1.7 Bitcoin per block incentive not to increase block size.