It's a tacit assumption that there is a scaling problem though. It's held up by people that are enthusiastic about bitcoin but not knowledgeable about the problem that it is meant to solve. A bunch of early adopters like Andreas and Ver went around telling people bitcoin is going to kill banks and become a new world currency.
But the active devs and those that have spent 20 years working on the problem of a digital money, realized long ago that the trade off for the security needed it is such that it cannot scale to be a global currency.
They ARE working on layer 2 solutions but they aren't saying bitcoin will usurp all fiat etc.
Bitcoin has a role already, without improvements, as a digital gold. It can still store great value securely without scaling. The want to create a money that scales to having every person use it for free etc. is a silly one.
Its roger ver, telling the top developers in the world, "Make it free" and them telling him the economics doesn't work like that, the system is not costless. It's so silly but there are a lot of sincere people caught up in the lie because it sounds so great.
Szabo on scaling:
http://unenumerated.blogspot.ca/2017...alability.html
Quote:
We need more socially scalable ways to securely count nodes, or to put it another way to with as much robustness against corruption as possible, assess contributions to securing the integrity of a blockchain. That is what proof-of-work and broadcast-replication are about: greatly sacrificing computational scalability in order to improve social scalability. That is Satoshi’s brilliant tradeoff. It is brilliant because humans are far more expensive than computers and that gap widens further each year. And it is brilliant because it allows one to seamlessly and securely work across human trust boundaries (e.g. national borders), in contrast to “call-the-cop” architectures like PayPal and Visa that continually depend on expensive, error-prone, and sometimes corruptible bureaucracies to function with a reasonable amount of integrity.
Quote:
. Blockchain technology, which implements data integrity via computer science rather than via “call the cops”, has so far made possible trust-minimized money -- cryptocurrencies – and will let us make progress in other financial areas as well as other areas where transactions can be based primarily on data available online.
This is not to say that adapting our institutions to our new capabilities will be easy, or indeed in particular cases anything short of difficult and improbable. Utopian schemes are very popular in the blockchain community, but they are not viable options. Reverse-engineering our highly evolved traditional institutions, and even reviving in new form some old ones, will usually work better than designing from scratch, than grand planning and game theory. One important strategy for doing so was demonstrated by Satoshi – sacrifice computational efficiency and scalability -- consume more cheap computational resources -- in order to reduce and better leverage the great expense in human resources needed to maintain the relationships between strangers involved modern institutions such as markets, large firms, and governments.
