And it would be nice to have even smaller fees on Ether and transaction time less than a second, so it could be better than VISA/Mastercard.

The issue of Bitcoin is not the technical part; it's that no consensus can be reached between people on what is the right course of action, leading to multiple forks of the network.

Take a look at the charts here, http://bc.daniel.net.nz

It's not "free" to process more transactions. At some point you are no longer p2p and decentralized when the requirements to run a node go up so high, so quickly .

I'm assuming those full nodes will eventually be intended to be run in data centers.

I was talking just about Ether, what happens to time/fees if number of transactions goes 1000x?

> The issue of Bitcoin is not the technical part; it's that no consensus can be reached between people on what is the right course of action, leading to multiple forks of the network

I don't think it's a problem of Bitcoin. It has its pros and cons, but it allows bitcoin evolve, assessing different approaches. It's like saying that main problem of open source projects is that they can be forked. Is it a problem or is it a feature?

At this rate we'll have 10 forks with minor changes in 5 years, and that just isn't good. Some pragmatism in working towards a common goal should be expected.

Unless people believe the current state of Bitcoin is good enough to be digital gold. It might very well be.

I'm curious, how many drug dealers do you know that accept Ether?