Finally: in my opinion, there is rough consensus that the 1MB block size limit WILL be raised. It is just a question of when and how much / how quickly.
To say there is a rough consensus that the 1MB block limit will be raised at some unspecified time in the future is missing the point. The real issue is, is there a consensus that a large fraction of the transaction volume will in the future happen off-chain? Given the range of opinions between you and Mike, who expect transaction fees to stay low enough for all but microtransactions, Pieter Wuille, who if I am correct is unsure, and Jeff Garzik, and Gregory Maxwell, who are both working on designs for off-chain transaction systems, I just don't see a consensus.
After all, for the user, the limit itself isn't the issue, the issue is how they will be expected to store and spend their Bitcoins, and what kind of security Bitcoin will provide them. I haven't seen anything from you or Mike actually talking concretely about what kind of protection from authorities and others trying to control Bitcoin that you expect Bitcoin to be able to provide. For instance, in the future, do you expect that by paying a sufficiently high fee can I expect get my transaction confirmed eventually, regardless of who I am or what the transaction is for? Do you expect me to be able to vote on what transactions do get confirmed and included in blocks, in proportion to the hashing power I possess? Do you expect me to be above to participate in Bitcoin by creating transactions and mining as a full validating node anonymously?
Satoshi said back in 2010 that he intended larger block sizes to be phased in with some simple if (height > flag_day) type logic, theymos has linked to the thread before.
I think he would be really amazed at how much debate this thing has become. He never attributed much weight to it, it just didn't seem important to him. And yes, obviously, given the massive forum dramas that have resulted it'd have been nice if he had made the size limit floating from the start like he did with difficulty. However, he didn't and now we have to manage the transition.
You know, I didn't think anything at first of the Wiki page on scaling advocating simply increasing the block size as required, even to the point of requiring full nodes to have tens of thousands of dollars worth of high speed internet connections and UTXO storage hardware. But eventually I started thinking about the implications - the turning point for me was really when I realized how large miners could use large blocks as a way to force smaller miners out of business.
Satoshi didn't foresee pool mining, the dangers of bloating the UTXO set, or even that multiple clients would be used. Bitcoin was a brilliant idea, don't get me wrong, but Satoshi was a person, not some all knowing all seeing deity. It doesn't surprise me the slightest that he might not have thought through all the implications of allowing the block size to increase without bound, just like he left Bitcoin with a scripting system that turns out to not have that many actual applications.
The massive forum dramas ultimately come down to the fact that regardless of whether the block size is left as it is, or increased, Bitcoin as we know it will change; there just isn't consensus on how it will change. You come from Google, a place of massive centralized server farms controlled by one company. Google's services work pretty well - centralization can have benefits - but many of us feel that goes down a very dangerous path. It's easy to see how a world where blocks are sufficiently large that only well funded pools with highly visible high-speed internet connections can lead to government and large businesses controlling Bitcoin. Fundamentally, distributing large amounts of data in a censorship resistant way is far harder than distributing small amounts of data.
