VISA scale is roughly 10,000 transactions per second. If you count Lightning network, that's theoretically possible, but I don't think the network is currently doing anywhere near that and has some scaling and liquidity issues from what I understand. Maybe it will get there, but it's not there yet.

As for fees, however, Bitcoin does not care how much BTC you're sending in a single transaction, whereas VISA charges 1-2% as a fee. So, if you want to transact in large amounts (tens of thousands to millions of dollars) across borders, it's hard to beat Bitcoin.

Personally I have more faith in Ethereum community to solve the scalability problem with blockchain vis-a-vis zkRollups, Optimistic Rollups, and Sharding. Ethereum already scales to 2,000 TPS and after ETH2 is launched, will exceed 100K transactions per second.

> So, if you want to transact in large amounts (tens of thousands to millions of dollars) across borders, it's hard to beat Bitcoin.

No, it's actually very easy. Moving 100k across borders with a SWIFT transfer would cost me $20-30 (and I'm a nobody, someone doing that a lot would switch to a business account and pay maybe half of that). And if you time it well (i.e. during office hours for the emitting, intermediary and receiving banks) it shouldn't take more than a couple hours.

And that's using USD. Switch to Euro as your medium and now it's costing you literally nothing or a few cents.

> it shouldn't take more than a couple hours That's simply not true. It takes days for most banks to "settle their books", before which any money they've transferred hasn't really gone anywhere.

For day-to-day expenses for us common folk that's not really a concern but for big sums of money the recipient will want a little more certainty of the transaction having completed.

This can take weeks with some banks too.

(Source: I work for a major bank)

Well your employer sucks then. It certainly doesn't take my banks days to receive a Swift transfer.

This is another good point. Even for day-to-day transactions, VISA is not instant. The only thing that's instant is the authorization that you can spend X amount of money. But the actual transfer of funds from customer account to merchant account takes days. Whereas, again, with Bitcoin or crypto, it's minutes to settle.

Ok, you try sending $50K or $500K to Argentina or Russia or China and let me know how quick your transaction goes through.

> As for fees, however, Bitcoin does not care how much BTC you're sending in a single transaction, whereas VISA charges 1-2% as a fee. So, if you want to transact in large amounts (tens of thousands to millions of dollars) across borders, it's hard to beat Bitcoin.

Bitcoin was designed to have lower fees than traditional payment processors. From the introduction of the Bitcoin whitepaper:

> The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for non-reversible services.

The current narrative of BTC being "digital gold" and "only for big transactions" is not what it was originally designed as. In this sense Bitcoin Cash (BCH) [1] split from BTC to follow the original plan of electronic P2P cash that works for transactions of any size, including cents.

[1] https://www.bitcoincash.org/

No, he was right.. what changed since then was who maintains bitcoin. They stubbornly refuse to raise the max block size past 1MB, despite Satoshi putting it in as a temporary bug fix back when the average block size was more like 1KB. Bitcoin could easily scale larger than visa with sub-penny fees today simply by upping or removing a hard-coded constant. It’s insanity imho.

There's a coin that purports to be the real Bitcoin doing just that. What's the adoption rate of that coin again?

You refer to Bitcoin Cash (BCH) [1]. You are right that it split from Bitcoin BTC to follow the original scaling plan: increase the maximum block size and improve the software to make such bigger blocks work in a P2P network. Its adoption has been slow, but don't forget that it had to begin from scratch, as BTC was the one who retained the network effect. That's one of the difficult problems of cryptocurrencies: bootstrapping.

The big question for me is where would we be today if Bitcoin BTC hadn't sidetracked the original scaling plan and its adoption hadn't stopped in its tracks 3 years ago. Remember when Steam accepted Bitcoin? Microsoft Xbox Online? Dell? NewEgg? It was almost every week I read about some big company starting to accept Bitcoin. Then when they realized people were not using it because of the raising transaction fees and long confirmation times they dropped it.

[1] https://www.bitcoincash.org/

Actually the same person is maintaining Bitcoin. Satoshi is Adam Back, co-founder and CEO of Blockstream.

Citation needed.

I don’t know about that.

>Was he wrong about that, or has something changed since then?

Nope he was right about that. What changed is blockstream took control of bitcoin development. They dont agree that on chain scaling is possible, and instead push proprietary alternatives to scale bitcoin where they can extract fees.