I’m curious about the developers feelings on scalability. For example, could the system handle a million users, doing say 5 transactions each per day. 5 million transactions per day is roughly 35,000 transactions per 10 minute period?

Is there a bottle neck in propagating 35,000 transactions to a million nodes for block generation? Or has that issue been designed for?

The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale.  That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server.  The design supports letting users just be users.  The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be.  Those few nodes will be big server farms.  The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don’t generate.

Quote from: bytemaster on July 28, 2010, 20:59:42
Besides, 10 minutes is too long to verify that payment is good. It needs to be as fast as swiping a credit card is today.

See the snack machine thread, I outline how a payment processor could verify payments well enough, actually really well (much lower fraud rate than credit cards), in something like 10 seconds or less.  If you don’t believe me or don’t get it, I don’t have time to try to convince you, sorry.
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=423.msg3819#msg3819

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