[MBCook]

How many money transfers do Visa or Amex handle per day? The Federal Reserve? What about Western Union?

Is bitcoin capable of doing 50% of that? 10%? 1%?

I know people have just decided to expand the block size but what's a realistic limit on how many transactions can be done per hour? Is that enough for real widespread use?

I can certainly see uses but I worry that he can never get big enough to truly matter. Or if it does that a government or large private entity could easily try to take it over through force of computing power.

[rampage101]

The reason it's gone up so much recently is that they just scaled it to handle more transactions. As other pointed out you can send an arbitrary amount whether it's 40 cents or 40 million dollars and it transfers quickly.

There's no holidays for the blockchain like banks have so you can send 24 hours a day, every day.