Stripe is getting rid of bitcoin because it has proven to be impractical at scale. It is impractical at scale because the fundamental technology, proof-of-work, is impractical at scale. The two alternatives mentioned are the same in this respect, with only the smallest differences.

Bitcoin (BTC) chain stakeholders (miners, etc.) have chosen to make the current level of transaction throughput be expensive and relatively slow. But there is no such binary tradeoff between "does scale" and "doesn't scale". It is a spectrum. It would be (technologically) trivial for bitcoin to support its current transaction rate with cheap, fast transactions - but the community has opted not to. There are alternative coins that have decided that cheap and fast transactions are important now - not at some undefined future time as will be satisfied by a working, adopted lightning network implementation.

You are free to prefer one choice over the other, but I think it would be more accurate to say that regular on-chain bitcoin doesn't scale the way you want it to.

Uh, unless you've got some way to make a decentralized blockchain function at 2.5 GiB every 10 minutes, it's effectively not a spectrum.

At 8mb block size we'd still have the same problem. Except instead of happening at 5 million weekly users it happens at 40 million weekly users. And at 100mb block size we might get to 100 million daily users.

Still haven't scaled the thing. We'd need to support billions of daily users for people to be happy. It's an open question right now

There is work underway pursuing GB sized blocks (https://themerkle.com/what-is-the-gigablock-testnet-initiati...). I think it is a feasible path forward. And even if it turns out to be difficult to achieve with today's infrastructure and technology, cryptocurrencies won't suddenly have a billion people using it for daily transactions overnight. I think we could easily support 100 MB blocks now - which would be 100x what current bitcoin provides. In my opinion, that provides quite a bit of time to continue to investigate various scaling avenues.

Scaling is not a binary. Being "practical at scale" depends on what scale you're talking about. Some things scale better than others; sometimes you can make a change that allows for better scaling. Sometimes something may not scale very well, but may scale well enough for a specific task.

Bitcoin has made a number of decisions to limit how well it can scale. Other systems, despite having the same basic underpinning, have made different decisions, and can scale better.

> It is impractical at scale because the fundamental technology, proof-of-work, is impractical at scale.

Well, it isn't just the "size of blockchain" that is the problem. The idea that people want an irreversible system to perform commerce on the open internet seems to be a fundamental issue as well. That and all the other problems like no central bank to regulate money supply, no good secure way to store them, etc.... I have yet to see any of these issues be solved in any crypto.

In short, perhaps the entire idea of a crypto currency isn't a very good one at all...