[IkmoIkmo]

Speed is not a function of capacity in this particular context. A car with 1 seat driving 500 m/h is faster, don't you think, than a car with 4 seats that drives 50 m/h.

I mean we can argue semantics, but if you want to send $100 from the US to the Philippines, bitcoin is generally a lot faster than your bank, even when you have to buy bitcoin and sell it in the Philippines because of international transactions taking much longer than local ones.

As for capacity, bitcoin's 'Chief Scientist' just wrote a blog post on scalability: http://gavintech.blogspot.de/2015/01/twenty-megabytes-testin...

To make a long story short, thousands of transactions per second (Visa averages about 2k) is certainly possible. I'd be more worried about bitcoin adoption (from an interest/tech/growth point of view) as a limit than technical scalability issues as a limit, especially with things like sidechains. (Look at Blockstream's Sidechains for example as a solution, just got a $21m investment.)

It's generally held that it can scale, whether it can grow and become popular and well used remains to be seen (I think it's likely but it's far from certain).