This has been discussed before. I believe most people don't expect Bitcoin
to replace all of the various methods of payment.  Scalability is always a
concern, just not to the level of  Alipay this year (or the next or the
next for that matter.)

Nick
On Jan 30, 2015 7:08 PM, "Angel Leon" <gubatron@gmail.com> wrote:

> On the Chinese "Single's Day" (sort of like the american Black Friday)
> according to MIT's Tech Review
> <http://www.technologyreview.com/news/534001/alipay-leads-a-digital-finance-revolution-in-china/>
> magazine
>
> "Alipay handled up to 2.85 million transactions per minute, and 54 percent
> of its transactions are made via mobile device."
>
> For a few weeks I've been reading the conversations about block sizes and
> the experiments being done on the subject with larger blocks.
>
> On the day with the most transactions, the Bitcoin block chain averages
> about 73 transactions per minute. I kept wondering what blocksize we'd need
> for handling 100,000 transactions per minute, and estimated that roughly
> we'd need a blocksize of about 1300x times larger than what we have now, so
> bigger than 1Gb block... but seeing the numbers Alipay gets to handle just
> in China make me wonder how scalable is Bitcoin if it were to truly compete
> with worldwide financial services.
>
> If you were to include double the number Alipay can handle, you'd be
> shooting about 6 million transactions per minute, or roughly 60 million
> transactions per block.
>
> If you average every transaction around 250 bytes, then you'd need ~15
> Gigabytes per block to be broadcast and hashed by all the full nodes every
> 10 minutes, eating good 2Tb of storage daily... do miners have enough
> bandwidth and CPU power to handle this?
>
> are my scalability concerns absurd?
>
> http://twitter.com/gubatron
>
>
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