[rmah]

The scale problem exists because of two things:

1) currently, only about 6 blocks can be verified by the network per hour. That is fixed, any faster and the difficulty rises. Any slower and the difficulty declines. With the current code in use, it will always be about 6 blocks per hour.

2) currently, blocks are limited to 1MB in size. This means that only a certain number of transactions can be processed per block (apx 1200 to 2500).

Thus, only 24 * 6 * #txns_per_block => 170k to 350k transactions can be processed per day. It doesn't matter how many computers are verifying new blocks in the blockchain. This is an... issue.

Note, a "transaction" is moving BTC from one wallet to another wallet.

[gopz]

Thanks, I forgot about the automatic increase/decrease in difficulty as miners come and go. Why won't increasing the transactions per block scale forever? I see lots of people saying it's not a permanent solution. Is the SegWit stuff basically just going to allow for 'meta-transactions' so that you can create a faster overlay network as a sort of clearing house?