Can IOTA really scale that well?
IN THEORY it can scale infinitely because no one network participant needs to audit any more of the tangle than he is capable of auditing. It's like a volunteer thing. Every bit helps but you don't HAVE to help. But the software is still basically alpha proof of concept stage. Time will tell if we can really get there.
in practice however you get 24 hour confirm times sometimes for transactions, so the scaling still has to be proven beyond the whitepaper.