[gregmac]

I'm out of the loop on this stuff, but are others doing things to prevent the situation Bitcoin had a couple years ago, when it hit $37 per transaction?

That seemed to happen due to a massive price and volume increase, so is hard to design for. At the same time, at peak, it was still doing a tiny fraction of the volume that any of the credit card networks do.

[leppr]

Blockchain scaling is still a very active area of research, and anyone (like GP) telling you there's a battle-tested solution available today to replace Visa is lying to you.

On the precise issue of transaction cost predictability, I think most solutions would revolve around creating a market for the ability to execute future transactions. There's a hackish project on Ethereum doing just that: https://gastoken.io/

[bufferoverflow]

Yeah, BTC limited the block size, so transaction cost went through the roof. Thankfully there are many alternatives. BCH is great.