Whichever path it ends up going down, centralization is guaranteed.
While there is certainly centralization pressure on mining, I do not agree that 8MB blocks make it impossible for everyone except for 'powerful companies' to run a full node, especially a pruned one. An enthusiastic early adoptor or investor holding, say, $100k of the token is more than capable of spending $500/yr to run a colo'd node. Would they prefer to spend $0 and host it at home? Probably. But the expense of a high-end VPS or low-end colo box is not totally prohibitive. We're not talking about more than a few rack units worth of HW.
The idea that bitcoin can exist only as a settlement layer is a dream. It was pitched as something you can buy a cup of coffee with. Now the core team wants to call that a "spam transaction". Yeah right. Time to fire Core.
it's open source, there's no one to "fire". if you're not happy with it, fork it like bitcoin cash did.
Not to mention, if Bitcoin becomes a settlement layer then no one can run a full node since most transactions will be off chain. Plus the enjoyment of running a full node is greatly reduced if you're just seeing settlement data between large payment systems.
being able to fully verify the blockchain and the transactions. sure, if all you care about is making a payment you can use a SPV client or even a webwallet, but being able to not r
>if Bitcoin becomes a settlement layer then no one can run a full node since most transactions will be off chain
that's what the lightning network is for. in which case you don't even need the huge blocks.