Re: Will the blockchain transform into an inter-cluster-settlement system?
Well your numbers were...lets call them "large" 
but the meme that "Bitcoin should scale to handle a high volume of microtransactions" is rampant in here and I think it's worth pointing out that handling that volume is not really practical in the Bitcoin paradigm.
It adds zero value to the discussion to point out that the existing implementation can not scale to the necessary values. Everybody knows that already. Currently Bitcoin utilizes bandwidth and storage space in the least efficient way possible. Of course it can't continue to do that and scale to a million transactions per second. Nobody is suggesting that it can, so stop pointing out the obvious as if you are bringing something useful to the table. but the meme that "Bitcoin should scale to handle a high volume of microtransactions" is rampant in here and I think it's worth pointing out that handling that volume is not really practical in the Bitcoin paradigm.