Inb4 'merkle trees', 'invertible bloom filters', 'something something moore's law', 'the market will sort it out', 'side chains', etc.

Really? Could you at least address why these things don't allow bitcoin to scale? It's pretty unproductive to criticize something, then say inb4 all the reasons why most criticism is invalid. It's like saying 'Humans are stupid because a child can't do math. inb4 comments about how adults can'. I mean why even post that?

Point is, 1mb limits are arbitrary, which is where the 1 TPS comes from, 1 TPS is how much transaction data fits in a 1 megabyte block. You know this, so say it.

And that 1 megabyte block can go to 10 megabytes. Why not to 1 billion megabytes? Because it's expensive to process that data (network to transfer it, storage to store it, CPU to verify signatures).

And it's a PERFECTLY sensible thing to then say, that moore's law affects the ability to verify more transaction signatures. Or that Kryder's law affects the ability to store more data. Or that Nielsen's law allows networks to transfer more data.

How childish is it to say 'inb4 perfectly fine reasons why my criticism is more nuanced'.

And yes, the blockchain can be pruned, requiring less storage. And yes filters can be used to require less data to be transferred. And yes it is possible to run light-nodes, where you only store some transactions and not others, so that you can make a small contribution to decentralisation.

But look at the current 1 MB blocks. That's 1024 kilobytes every 600 seconds, or 1.7 kb per second.

Now look at an example, take Bitpay, they have made public that they process close to half a billion dollars a year. (yes, peanuts compared to VISA, don't worry I know). And they've done this by utilizing a fraction of the bitcoin blockchain. Which itself is at a fraction of its current arbitrary 1 MB block capacity.

So a company that utilizes a fraction of the blockchain, which is at a fraction of full capacity, which utilizes 1.7 kb/s of network, is powering half a billion dollars of money processed per year, without any optimizations, and you're telling me that this can't scale up today, nor can it scale up up in the next 10 years despite moore, kryder, nielsen's laws, even after optimizations?

It's simply not true. I won't stand here and say bitcoin can scale to 1 million VISA networks, no. I know there are limitations, and I appreciate that a distributed, redundant, decentralized system is more expensive than having to run a single centralized node.

I appreciate that. But this notion that bitcoin can't scale at all to any significant TPS period is so devoid of any NUANCE.

And your comment about how core devs realized bitcoin can't scale. I'll leave you with these concluding remarks by Gavin Andresen, Chief Scientist of bitcoin's core development who virtually completely disagrees with you. (in a nuanced way with caveats) [0]. Doesn't make him right and you wrong in and of itself (although he's both a very involved guy, knows what he's talking about, but isn't on the hype train. i.e. he still calls bitcoin 'an experiment'.) but at least the notion that bitcoin core devs don't think it can scale is, again, a lot more nuanced.

As for the corporate shill, freedom hater etc stuff. I hear you, that kind of sentiment from some bitcoiners got old really fast. But it's not nearly as bad as a few years ago. A lot of cool sensible middle-ground folk have arrived who get as tired by a 'you're a corporate shill so your comment is invalid' remark by a crazy bitcoiner as a 'you probably think I'm a corporate shill, so you're a bitcoin nut whose comment is invalid' remark by people like you.

[0] Comments by Gavin Andresen on scalability:
https://bitcoinfoundation.org/2014/10/a-scalability-roadmap/

There is a clear path to scaling up the network to handle several thousand transactions per second (“Visa scale”). Getting there won’t be trivial, because writing solid, secure code takes time and because getting consensus is hard. Fortunately technological progress marches on, and Nielsen’s Law of Internet Bandwidth and Moore’s Law make scaling up easier as time passes.

The map gets fuzzy if we start thinking about how to scale faster than the 50%-per-increase-in-bandwidth-per-year of Nielsen’s Law. Some complicated scheme to avoid broadcasting every transaction to every node is probably possible to implement and make secure enough.

But 50% per year growth is really good. According to my rough back-of-the-envelope calculations, my above-average home Internet connection and above-average home computer could easily support 5,000 transactions per second today.

That works out to 400 million transactions per day. Pretty good; every person in the US could make one Bitcoin transaction per day and I’d still be able to keep up.

After 12 years of bandwidth growth that becomes 56 billion transactions per day on my home network connection — enough for every single person in the world to make five or six bitcoin transactions every single day. It is hard to imagine that not being enough; according the the Boston Federal Reserve, the average US consumer makes just over two payments per day.

So even if everybody in the world switched entirely from cash to Bitcoin in twenty years, broadcasting every transaction to every fully-validating node won’t be a problem