if I have it right the maximum number of transactions btc network can handle is 7 per sec. coffee purchase and walmart trip has to go offchain eventually.
Only temporary limit while devs still work on improving the system. It's still in beta, and they don't want it to explode in use before its ready. Eventually, transaction limits will be removed, blockchain will be pruned, and the system will be able to handle way more transactions per second than VISA or anyone else (it can already handle such volume with current technology, but we don't want to force people to download 500MB blocks just yet
)Have not seen the recent work by the devs and you don't know me :-). That said, spent a lot of time reviewing the design and firmly believe that this sucker will scale quite well (so I agree with you Rassah).
Not everyone will be able to run a full node, that is very very clear. There will be plenty of people who donate a node due to the advantage it brings in transaction speed/identification and the bandwidth available to the typical business should allow for full nodes.
Also, am doubting that the speed to push new blocks (from a miner perspective) is as bad as folks think. Decent size datacenters have at least 10G uplinks and the main penalty is going to be on those miners/pools that are far away from each other. Australia, for example, may struggle to win at mining as consistently as places that are "closer" and "denser."
It would be interesting to see an analysis of time to block vs. block size to date (just to see if there are any correlations on this). Still need to do that unless someone has already done it?