[aggieben]

This is incorrect. Firstly, it's 10 per second. Secondly, it shouldn't be all that hard to imagine "side chains" or even "local-party networks" being built to handle transactions and use the underlying blockchain as a settlement mechanism. This is, as I understand it, how the lightning network works/will work, and I see no reason to think it wouldn't improve Bitcoin's adoption, which is already orders of magnitude better than other cryptos.

[melq]

>Croman, Kyle; Eyal, Ittay (2016). "On Scaling Decentralized Blockchains" (PDF). doi:10.1007/978-3-662-53357-4_8. Retrieved December 10, 2017. The maximum throughput is the maximum rate at which the blockchain can confirm transactions. Today, Bitcoin’s maximum throughput is 3.3–7 transactions/sec [1].

1. http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~prateeks/papers/Bitcoin-scaling....