Seriously.  Quoting yourself, quoting Mircea Popescu?  That's supposed to convince me of anything?  

Why am I even bothering to answer?  

Okay.  Visa and Bitcoin, ideally, are both used by people anywhere to pay people anywhere.  As such, they have to deal with many of the same engineering problems.  

The specific problem under discussion - transaction capacity vs. transaction load - is one of the ones they have in common.

I look at real information from Visa because they have a working system.  If you want us to look at real information from some different working system, present the information; it will be useful.  If you don't want us to look at real information, get the fuck out.  We NEED to be looking at real information.  

If somebody in Mali wants to buy Alpaca socks from somebody in Chile, and can't because there's no data-set that Chilean merchant can use to verify the validity of his Malian unspent txouts, that is what we call a failure of the system.  Maybe you don't like the existence of this large data-set.  That's okay; it works whether you like it or not.   Anything that would be as effective at avoiding failures will also work whether you, or anyone else, likes it or not.  In fact working whether anyone likes it or not is ESSENTIAL to avoiding failures.  

Make a proposal that there is less reason to dislike, or reason for fewer people to dislike, but which will still work whether or not anyone likes it, and it may be valuable.  But if you don't have a better idea, then please shut up.