It is woefully unfortunate that the first cryptocurrency Bitcoin-BTC did not offer much (on privacy) therein thus setting and tricking the entire space into abysmally low thought expectations for a decade.
hard to tell if bitcoin's limitations were there on purpose or the author didn't know better.
And some of the sense of need and technology for coin privacy (and other things) probably wasn't exactly well developed in the space yet. Today there's no excuse, and certainly not for any coin to skip devoting a clear section of their whitepapers to their privacy position. And to other classic problems.
At any rate on-chain scaling doesn't...scale
Everything must roll up, so whatever schemes people try to layer and split it up, it's all still one big network... subject to same aggregate laws of bandwidth and cpu.
problem gets worse when you add privacy features.
That's probably still an open question. 1 billion people transacting once a day is 11575 tx/s. That's roughly all humans on the planet once a week. As below, that may be a high estimate. Which is good because if you arbitrarily choke the tx processing core of a coin down to 1Mbps, that allows only 10B/tx. Today Monero and Zcash are something like 2kB/tx. It may be easier to lower tx size under some type of general zero knowledge mask. To model txrates you'd have to play around with various Fermi estimates... - Combine with stats from Visa, cash, cows, metals, securities, etc... - How people might restructure their life's behaviours around what coins can offer... - How people of different ages ability interest will proxy through others... - How people might deploy and keep various wallets, confirms, mines, relays running... - What numbers of each are needed to maintain distributed resiliency... - What happens as governments dissolve under adoption... - If #Open #Audited banks arise to issue own paper... - If hundreds of #Open #Audited decentralized standard crypto clearing houses arise... - If metals and other forms come back into prominance... - If a secure general purpose overlay network helps transform some privacy requirements into secure transport requirements... - What happens when move to UTXO db's is made... - How today's privacy coin tx sizes might improve... - If ledger models are augmented by serialized bill passing... - Many more factors to consider... Even today... 100Mbps core @ 4B ppl/wk ~= 2kB/tx
expect bitcoin developers to fix bitcoin's problems or be outcompeted
Due to their history of positions on not doing anything, combined with forum censorship, and other questions... if BTC ever does do something, probably now clearly only to prevent from dropping below 50% relavance or further under advancing competition, they'll become a laughing stock due to last minute position reversal, at that point mooting remaining vision and trust. That competition is coming. They will have to abdicate their all their dev and other positions off to a new generation of maintainers and advocates in order to truly save face of BTC. Or maybe BTC will remain on top, or maybe the entire cryptocurrency space will go to zero. Have fun :)