[buffalobuffalo]

It's not just the speed, it's also the fees. You ideally want something that has really minimal fees, so that you can send $.0001 without paying 10x that in fees. The ability to process micro-transactions cheaply and at scale could actually have the transforming affect that bitcoin was originally after.

[Robotbeat]

Right. That’s what Satoshi wrote in their paper.

But throughput and fees are related, of course. As I noted, low transaction throughput combined with high popularity means very high fees. Fees get bid up. So to maintain low fees while having high popularity, you need high transaction throughput.

[saalweachter]

Hmmm, working the other way, if your goal is to process 100k transactions / second, with each transaction being 1/100th of a cent and your transaction fees being 1/100th of that, your budget for operating your network would be, what, $3M / year?

[Robotbeat]

True centi-cent microtransactions like that is going to need probably tens of millions (or even billions) of transactions per second.