If you follow what real core developers are saying like Van der Laan (don’t listen to Gavin “Wright is Satoshi”  Andresen), it will take many years, likely decades, for bitcoin to scale to anywhere near a major payment network.

In order for bitcoin to compete with just the ACH Network it would need to move $43 trillion and 25 billion electronic financial transactions each year. That’s roughly 125 times more transactions than bitcoin is currently doing very poorly. There is a backlog in the mempool so it can’t even keep up with what it’s currently doing.

If you look at the transactions processed by the major credit brands (Visa, MC, Discover, etc.), it appears to be around 100 billion transactions. That’s 500 times more than bitcoin is currently processing poorly. Now we’re up to 625 times increase in transaction volume for bitcoin.

Pure EFT transactions (debit card) is around 50 billion per year. That adds another 250 times more transactions worldwide than bitcoin is currently doing poorly. We are now at 875 x current number of transactions that bitcoin is now doing horribly at keeping up.

It’s safe to say that at minimum it will take many decades before bitcoin can be made to effectively scale enough to just replace the ACH Network. It could possibly take the entire lifetime of the youngest bitcoiner on this forum before to could scale enough to take over all major worldwide financial transactions. If it could be made to handle that kind of volume, bitcoin would need to change from its current 5 or less transactions a second to 56,000 transactions a second and the blockchain would fill up the New York public library.