You're probably the one and only developer I wouldn't mind proving me wrong 
If you can show me proof of an existing crypto processing 250 tx/s sustained, I'll be mildly impressed. If it can be done on 20 or less nodes, I'll be suitably impressed. If you can show the same doing 500 tx/s+ I'll be very impressed.
Likewise if you can show peaks of 500, 1000 & 2000+ the corresponding impressed level as described above will be in effect
If you can show me proof of an existing crypto processing 250 tx/s sustained, I'll be mildly impressed. If it can be done on 20 or less nodes, I'll be suitably impressed. If you can show the same doing 500 tx/s+ I'll be very impressed.
Likewise if you can show peaks of 500, 1000 & 2000+ the corresponding impressed level as described above will be in effect
What are requirements for bandwidth, RAM and CPU of a node?
PS: I'm using a hash-based signing algorithm, it's much faster than elliptic curve stuff (even faster than Ed25519), so I may have some advantage right from the start.