I think it's ultimately a question of higher fees. They want people to stop using Bitcoin for small transactions and only use it for larger transactions with higher fees, but they just don't want to say it. Bitcoin has been going that direction for a long time now, but nobody will out and out say that's the plan.
Using bitcoin for larger transactions is the way bitcoin can be utilized best - because that's where the biggest savings are.
Here is an example:
You have ~250.000 txs per day.
Now, you can do 250.000 micropayments per day, averaging, say 1$. So that's 250.000 USD per day in volume.
What have you accomplished, in the larger scheme of things? Nothing. Your annual transaction volume is a pitiful 91 million dollars, while having a marketcap exceeding 6bn USD. You can't even justify your marketcap with microtxs.
Even at 2mb blocks or 4mb blocks, or 10mb blocks, you are still at 180mn / 360mn / 910mn usd per year - again you can't justify your marketcap. It has to deflate and lose value.
Now you get those 250.000 txs per day and you attach to them 600$ in avg value*.
Suddenly you are moving around 200mn USD per DAY or 73 BILLION PER YEAR.
At 2mb or 4mb, you are hitting 146
bn to 292
bn per year.
Now you are making an impact**. Now you are saving people of
billions in fees that would have gone to the western unions, paypals and credit cards. You can't save people those billions by throwing away your advantage and doing microtransactions, buying coffees.
* That's around how much we are doing right now, on avg, per tx: Currently ~250k txs can generate ~150-230mn USD per day in transaction volume. That's outputs minus change.
https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-usd?timespan=30days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=Some days it peaks to >800$ per tx - and in a few years we might be seeing averages in the tens of thousands - meaning that BTC will be able to pull annual transaction volumes in the
trillions of USD - contrary to the propaganda that BTC can't scale (since value per transaction CAN scale 5-10-100x with no technological issues). Keep in mind that our current 600-800$/tx is currently done while fees for first block inclusion are typically at an extremely low 0.04$ to 0.06$ and while dust movement is still going on in the network because it is economically ...viable. Also keep in mind that western unions, paypals, banks, charge tens of dollars for moving around, say, 500 or 1000$ around the globe. A 250$ payment received through paypal cost me 20$ in paypal and bank fees and a western union transfer of 180$, cost me 25$. And people are complaining that BTC is ...expensive, or that it's excluding them. You have to lol pretty hard when you get a reality calibration versus the legacy payment systems.
**
For comparison purposes:
Western Union[1] does 85bn in moving funds between customers and paypal[2] does ~230bn per year.
1. http://ir.westernunion.com/News/Press-Releases/Press-Release-Details/2016/Western-Union-Cross-Border-Platform-Connects-Consumers-to-over-One-Billion-Bank-Accounts/default.aspx
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal