Imagine in 10-50 years, when there are beyond billions of transactions monthly, the amount of resources a bitcoin blockchain takes up will be so out of control that only large data centers can support it. And whoever has enough money and resources to be able to service the entire blockchain has in essence centralized a decent chunk of bitcoin, and I'm assuming that there would only be at the most 10 block chains in existent if it's that out of control. It's pretty likely bitcoin will grow faster than moore's law.
So how will this impending centralization be stopped?
well the devs have been pretty clear that they dont have any interest in stopping this. the idea i think is that by the time it became that centralized it would be so mainstream that we would already be past the point where governments had any hope of shutting it down, even if it was centralized.
many of us though would prefer that they not raise the max block size and off chain transactions could pick up the slack. we believe the market would invent clever decentralized(ish) mechanisms to deal with this problem if there were a market for it. One idea is bitcoin denominated chaum tokens maintained by a network of ot federated chaum banks. these chaum banks would be more centralized than bitcoin in its current state but much more decentralized than what you were talking about in your post, and most likely highly adaptive. if the government could locate and take out 1 chaum bank operator more would spring up to take his place instantly.
one idea i like is using multisgnature transactions to create a risk fund that would allow you to create trust with a bank than could handle off chain transactions for you. this way you could use on chain transactions for large transactions, which would be good since you wouldnt want to be forced to risk a huge amount of capital to make off chain transactions, and you could use off chain transactions for smaller transactions, which would be good because you wouldnt have to risk a lot for small transactions.
