I think that Bitcoin will be able to scale to Visa scale levels over the long term, just by increasing the blocksize. It depends on the rate of technological progress. It might be twenty years or a hundred years but we will get their eventually. You could even say that Bitcoin is ahead of its time in terms of its technological demands.
Visa transaction capacity of 2015 achievable in 2115; this makes a lot of sense.
Thank you for sharing this useful list. It will be of great use to me. I have just read the first pages and it looks like the best solution for Bitcoin right now. If this gets implemented into Bitcoin, it would improve it a lot in both transaction confirmation times and mainstream use.
Essentially what LN enables you to do is have an theoretically infinite amount of transactions between you and another participant while requiring only 2 transactions on the blockchain (opening and closing the payment channel). The efficiency in comparison to transacting on the blockchain directly is huge. Additionally once you've set-up the channel (which takes around ~30 minutes now (3 confirmations)) your transactions are near instant.
Yes to achieve that huge amount of transactions per second is impossible to achieve on chain.
Well technically we could achieve a much larger TPS than what we have today, however we'd have to sacrifice a lot of decentralization in order to get there. Even then, it is doubtful that we'd ever catch up with Visa.
