Quote from: pj on December 28, 2010, 12:15:18 PM

In the current design, yes, a bitcoin bank handles micropayments better. I was more concerned with the "does not scale" phrase I quoted.

It does not scale well for micropayments as every single transaction has to be written down forever in the blockchain stone.

Quote from: pj on December 28, 2010, 12:15:18 PM

Where can I find a careful performance analysis of bitcoin? How does it scale with millions or billions of users, in terms of such things as transaction speed, computational and memory requirements per node, network bandwidth requirements, ...?

You are mixing up different things.
- Performance of the bitcoin client algorithms used for transaction verification
- Performance of transaction processing

The former is described in satoshi's PDF.
The latter is, by design, subject to the market (see transaction fees)

Quote from: pj on December 28, 2010, 12:15:18 PM

An ~~ideal~~imaginary system would allow a billion human users all to issue 0.0001 BTC transactions at the same time, and have all such transactions (for those users whose local network and computer resources function adequately) to complete in under a second. I presume that neither bitcoin nor any other system we are aware of can reach this ideal.

You have to define more clearly what you mean by "completed" for a transaction. Bitcoin transactions are broadcast instantly to the network and currently propagate pretty fast (seconds). Is that a "completed" transaction ? Or is it "completed" when it's buried under three, six, a million blocks ?

Quote from: pj on December 28, 2010, 12:15:18 PM

But I doubt bitcoin can succeed unless it has a performance analysis, preferably of peer-reviewed research paper quality, and a clear strategy for dealing with whatever manner and way it falls short of the impossible ideal I described.

I think the community is eager to get reviews on satoshi's paper, I won't call it peer review because it has never been stated anywhere (to my knowledge) that satoshi is a researcher, he might even be a group of people.

Quote from: pj on December 28, 2010, 12:15:18 PM

But I'm new here; so likely such a performance analysis exists and I just have not noticed it yet.

See previous answers, and welcome