This isn't about "everyone's coffee".  This is about an absolute minimum amount of participation by people who wish to use the network.   If our goal is really for bitcoin to really be a global, open transaction network that makes money fluid, then 7tps is already a failure.  If even 5% of the world (350M people) was using the network for 1 tx per month (perhaps to open payment channels, or shift money between side chains), we'll be above 100 tps.  And that doesn't include all the non-individuals (organizations) that want to use it.

The goals of "a global transaction network" and "everyone must be able to run a full node with their $200 dell laptop" are not compatible.  We need to accept that a global transaction system cannot be fully/constantly audited by everyone and their mother.  The important feature of the network is that it is open and anyone *can* get the history and verify it.  But not everyone is required to.   Trying to promote a system where the history can be forever handled by a low-end PC is already falling out of reach, even with our miniscule 7 tps.  Clinging to that goal needlessly limits the capability for the network to scale to be a useful global payments system



On 05/07/2015 03:54 PM, Jeff Garzik wrote:
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 3:31 PM, Alan Reiner <etotheipi@gmail.com> wrote:
 
(2) Leveraging fee pressure at 1MB to solve the problem is actually really a bad idea.  It's really bad while Bitcoin is still growing, and relying on fee pressure at 1 MB severely impacts attractiveness and adoption potential of Bitcoin (due to high fees and unreliability).  But more importantly, it ignores the fact that for a 7 tps is pathetic for a global transaction system.  It is a couple orders of magnitude too low for any meaningful commercial activity to occur.  If we continue with a cap of 7 tps forever, Bitcoin will fail.  Or at best, it will fail to be useful for the vast majority of the world (which probably leads to failure).  We shouldn't be talking about fee pressure until we hit 700 tps, which is probably still too low. 
 [...]

1) Agree that 7 tps is too low

2) Where do you want to go?  Should bitcoin scale up to handle all the world's coffees? 

This is hugely unrealistic.  700 tps is 100MB blocks, 14.4 GB/day -- just for a single feed.  If you include relaying to multiple nodes, plus serving 500 million SPV clients en grosse, who has the capacity to run such a node?  By the time we get to fee pressure, in your scenario, our network node count is tiny and highly centralized.

3) In RE "fee pressure" -- Do you see the moral hazard to a software-run system?  It is an intentional, human decision to flood the market with supply, thereby altering the economics, forcing fees to remain low in the hopes of achieving adoption.  I'm pro-bitcoin and obviously want to see bitcoin adoption - but I don't want to sacrifice every decentralized principle and become a central banker in order to get there.