[nivexous]

Almost all IP traffic goes through an Internet backbone router which can process 100Gbps+. It's no problem. I suggest people think of Bitcoin miners like this in the future. These would be big operations, yes, but they are economically incentivized to honesty, and there will be plenty of competition. Once you use your imagination, or try to build a node yourself, you'll see the only real bottleneck in Bitcoin's architecture is the updating of the UTXO set, and this can be made extremely fast - eventually in hardware. All other transaction and block validation and propagation can be parallelized or removed as a bottleneck. Users share transactions p2p and settle them onchain, and apps and services create sub-networks of transactions they care about. It all works. But to do that people need to drop the assumption that home users need to run a node - it's a broken idea that holds Bitcoin back. The original design of Bitcoin was remarkable in its ability to scale, which was written about by Satoshi and ignored, and this is being demonstrated again in Bitcoin SV. On the other hand, almost every other cryptocurrency has deviated from that simple design. Ethereum for example requires a global state database and cannot parallelize this way.

[ntr--]

"Trusted backbone transaction processors" that don't use megawatts of power to do this work have existed for some time as "banks".

[nivexous]

No. In this design users don't trust miners. Users trust Bitcoin. This is important. Banks can censor. Banks can go down. Banks can be forced to confiscate your money by a single court. But if one miner were to act up, other miners around the globe could keep them in check, and apps and users could switch around as desired. It's an incentivized complete system that you can't reduce this way.