Japanese Can Soon Pay Their Utility Bills with Bitcoin
I keep hearing about Bitcoin being used to pay for commodities, but will this actually ever scale? With a maximum transaction rate of ~3.5 transactions per second, won't any practical application of Bitcoin for the masses eventually have to be implemented by a bunch of trusted third parties operating off the blockchain and bundling transactions? At that point, we seem to be back to using credit card companies who just happen to use the blockchain for clearing transactions with each other.