[makomk]

Currently, the maximum transaction rate that Bitcoin can theoretically handle is about 7 transactions per second. Increasing that limit will require a hard fork that breaks all existing clients. A chunk of the community and at least one of the developers is really hostile to the idea, partly because it increases resource usage - every node needs to receive every single transaction and store it forever. At the current, fairly low, transaction rate limit that's 52 gigabytes of new transactions every year.

The other reason is that they feel that, without transaction rate limits, mining won't be profitable when the rate of coin subsidy drops off. Some argue that we need the competition for limited block space in order to drive fees up enough to keep mining profitable. Those same fees kill microtransactions.

Since a hard fork would require agreement from essentially everyone involved in Bitcoin, there's essentially no chance of this limit being increased.

[sneak]

> Since a hard fork would require agreement from essentially everyone involved in Bitcoin, there's essentially no chance of this limit being increased.

The bitcoin network underwent a hard fork a couple weeks ago due to a bug in the implementation of the on-disk database.

The developers reached out to the mining pools and got the vast majority downgraded within 8 or 12 hours. A day or two later a new version was pushed out that mimicked the old behavior up until the point that a supermajority of nodes were upgraded, and then switched to the new behavior.

Forks have happened before, and the community is close-knit enough to resolve them. Everyone's primary goals are a) being ideologically neutral and b) keeping the network running, in equal measure.

[sneak]

My music collection grows more than 52GB per year, and I've run databases that grow that much each day.

That's simply not a lot of data anymore.

[Andrew_Quentin]

Unless of course the value of bitcoins goes up because a bitcoin economy has taken roots.