Bictoin: Only 7 Transactions Per Second. Not gonna fly...

[zimmah]

7 tps can be raised, it is an artificial limit which didn't exist in the original client.  It was added after the fact as a denial of service prevention mechanism.

BitPay times out if the TX IS NOT SEEN IN 15 MINUTES.  This means 0-confirm.  My guess is you used a client which wasn't synced to the blockchain and your tx was never sent until >15 minutes after the invoice was created.  You probably shouldn't use the QT client it really isn't designed for "users".  I would recommend using a lite client like multibit or electrum which handles all the "hard stuff" (like keeping synced with blockchain) for you.

Still keep fudding.  You probably should sell all your Bitcoins now, you know it is going to fail so sell while you still can.

so, upping the limit to say, 100 tps is just trivial? they could do it within minutes?

or does it take days/months to change it?

because if bitcoin does boom overnight, and the transaction limit does prove to become a bottleneck, then the negative publicity and trust in bitcoin may severely damage it's reputation.

[DeathAndTaxes]

The code change itself is trivial (a handful of lines of code) but making the change which prevents a lasting hard fork requires establishing a consensus and that is never trivial.  So no it can't be changed overnight, the "issues" are more social than code related.  There currently is some debate on how high the cap should be raised, when it should be raised, and how it should be implemented (should it be a new temporary fixed cap, a new permanent fixed cap, a deterministic cap, or no cap).

[zimmah]

given bitcoin black friday peaked at 1.18 per second (if you take the day average, it may have peaked higher in reality) and the daily average is around 0.7 per second, we're only a factor 10 away from 7, and less so on peaks.

i'd say it's about time to upgrade the limit.

by the way, is the max. blocksize of 1Mb ever going to cause problems when there's a lot of transactions?