Scaling the network will come in the form of a combination of many
optimizations. Just because we do not know for sure how to eventually
serve 7 billion people does not mean we should make decisions on
global validation that impact our ability to serve the current set of
users.
Agreed. But I believe the economic and security arguments I gave regarding fees and incentives still hold and are largely separate from the scalability issue. Please correct me if I overlooked something.
Also, blocking a change because it's "more important to address issues
such as..." other improvements will further slow down the discussion.
I believe an increase will not prevent the development of other
improvements that we need - in contrast, the sooner we can get over
the limit (which, as you agree, needs to be changed at some point),
the sooner we can get back to work.
An increase in block size at this time will exacerbate security concerns around nodes relying on other nodes to validate (particularly miners and wallets). It’s not really a matter of having limited developer resources that need to be budgeted, as you seem to suggest.
Regarding developments on properly handling fees, there must exist the economic need for it before there’s an earnest effort to solve it. Increasing the block size right now will, in all likelihood, delay this effort. I’d much prefer to first let the fee market evolve because it’s a crucial component to the protocol’s design and its security model…and so we can get a better sense for fee economics. Then we might be able to figure out better approaches to block size changes in the future that makes sense economically…perhaps with mechanisms that can dynamically adjust it to reflect resource availability and network load.