[Bitcoin-development] Is there a way to estimate the maximum number of transactions per minute Bitcoin can handle as it is today?

[Angel Leon <gubatron@gmail.com>]

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On the Chinese "Single's Day" (sort of like the american Black Friday)
according to MIT's Tech Review
<http://www.technologyreview.com/news/534001/alipay-leads-a-digital-finance-revolution-in-china/>
magazine

"Alipay handled up to 2.85 million transactions per minute, and 54 percent
of its transactions are made via mobile device."

For a few weeks I've been reading the conversations about block sizes and
the experiments being done on the subject with larger blocks.

On the day with the most transactions, the Bitcoin block chain averages
about 73 transactions per minute. I kept wondering what blocksize we'd need
for handling 100,000 transactions per minute, and estimated that roughly
we'd need a blocksize of about 1300x times larger than what we have now, so
bigger than 1Gb block... but seeing the numbers Alipay gets to handle just
in China make me wonder how scalable is Bitcoin if it were to truly compete
with worldwide financial services.

If you were to include double the number Alipay can handle, you'd be
shooting about 6 million transactions per minute, or roughly 60 million
transactions per block.

If you average every transaction around 250 bytes, then you'd need ~15
Gigabytes per block to be broadcast and hashed by all the full nodes every
10 minutes, eating good 2Tb of storage daily... do miners have enough
bandwidth and CPU power to handle this?

are my scalability concerns absurd?

http://twitter.com/gubatron

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