Well, not quite. It lets the argument about scaling up be about mining only. UTXO indices + bloom filters (already implemented) means that miners are the only ones who need to attach themselves to the firehose of transactions on a scaled-up p2p network, or the terrabytes of historical blockchain data. If we scale up to the limits of a beefy desktop PC with a RAID array and >1Mbps network connection, we wouldn't be pushing anyone out from actually using the network.

In fairness, one does not really need to know what such things are to use them.

A much bigger concern in my mind is that one may need, say, 1Mbps of bandwidth which is free of disruption by commercial network carriers.  These players have little ability to act autonomously of government security policies even if they had a desire to do so.

I think it hopeful in the extreme to assume that any political leadership is going to stand idle by while the power inherent in controlling a currency system is eroded.  If distributed crypto-currencies never reaches the stage where it is a eats into existing monetary solutions and supplants some of their function then yes, we are probably safe from such attacks.  It is far from clear to me that such solutions will not achieve such a capability.

That ship has long since sailed, for reasons that have nothing to do with the block size limit.

Increase the block size! We need more centralization so we can handle the oncoming billionsPMMMFFFHHHMMPFF!! Sorry why is anyone concerned about this again? There cant be that much demand for gambling and drugs. I mean people certainly arent using them for legitimate things like postage.

As already said, a 56k modem can handle 30 MB blocks...

And you said it again.  Simply saying it twice does not, in and of itself, make it a particularly meaningful statement.

The beauty of off-chain solutions are that they have almost infinite flexibility to adapt to attacks.  Like a starfish, if you cut him to pieces each piece grows a new starfish.  In off-chain solution land, though, this would happen probably literally overnight in a lot of cases.  But it requires an enduring base upon which to ride.  That is, hopefully, a free Bitcoin network.

I found the rest of your note to fantastical to really comment on.  Sorry.

we run a few tor exit nodes at our colo and either (A) our colo provider or (B) the USG have substantially down-regulated our tor exit node bandwidth in the past couple month. we are capable of pushing up to ~1 Gbps of tor traffic but can only push ~20 Mbps at the moment.

i would expect to see a lot more manipulation of tor exit nodes in the future.

What the world desperately needs is a better store of value. We need a way of combating the inflationary policies of central banks worldwide.
Although gold has historically served this role, with the advent of the paper market, gold's true value has been obscured and manipulated by bankers. Bitcoin provides us with a new tamper-resistant way of saving our purchasing power over time.
Any increase in the blocksize will marginally decentralize and weaken this store of value property.
Personally, I'm all for storing my retirement savings "on the chain" and doing small, low-risk, day to day purchases "off the chain".

I'd love to hear what guys like Tuur D., Andreas A., Voorhees, and Surda think about the blocksize limit. I believe that ultimately this is more of an economic issue than a technical one.