Blockchain technology is a brand new technology whose first application is Bitcoin. Like all software, it is not perfect. Bitcoin has proven to be resilient in terms of security and as a store of value, but one major roadblock that we are running into is scalability.
As you may know, Bitcoin currently has a 1MB block size limit. A block is found on average every 10 minutes meaning that as a network Bitcoin is only able to process 1MB of transaction data every 10 minutes. Doing the math yields a limit of 7 transactions per second. That may sound like a lot, but compared to the giant credit card VISA which processed on average 2,000 transactions per second puts the limit in perspective. There are several proposals to increase the blocksize, some want a temporary 1MB blocksize increase in order to solve the temporary scalability problem, another proposal aims for a gradual blocksize increase starting from 8MB and doubling every 2 years for 20 years, last but not least another similar proposal exists which also gradually raises the blocksize limit but which allows miners to vote on future blocksizes.
Read More:
http://themerkle.com/news/current-state-of-the-blocksize-debate-bip-100-vs-bip-101/
