How will Counterparty handle the tx volume in markets Symbiont is aiming at (settlement infrastructure?)? Isn't Counterparty limited to Bitcoin's 7 tx per second?
There won't be an issue with transaction volume for a while. It's not going to be...
1. Launch
2. Tons of business and issues of multiple transactions a second
It's still going to take time.
Additionally, the block size increase that is being put in place soon will help alleviate that pain point.
But there has to be a long term plan.
The block size increase might help to make 140 out of the 7 tx (1 mb -> 20 mb) per second but that is still minuscule compared to the markets Counterparty is aiming at. TX/S have to be in the thousands at least... Trading takes much more volume than eccommerce / remittance (bitcoin use cases).
DTCC who clears about $1.8 quadrillion dollars yearly, or roughly equivalent of the U.S. GDP every three days undertook a study on the transisition to t+2 settlement and identified huge merits in the transition to 2 day settlement
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-05-22/dtcc-plans-study-on-faster-settlement-for-u-s-securities-1-so bear in mind even t+0 (same day settlement) is still a huge improvement compared to previous 3 (or more) day settlement, granted this on a much smaller scale
with gavins proposal, blocksize would double every 2 years, so something like this:
2016 8MB 0.1Mb/s 26Tx/s
2018 16MB 0.2Mb/s 53Tx/s
2020 32MB 0.4Mb/s 106Tx/s
2022 64MB 0.9Mb/s 213Tx/s
2024 128MB 1.7Mb/s 426Tx/s
Right now there is a theoretical ceiling of 604,800 bitcoin transactions that could be undertaken every day. By 2016 that could be 2.2 million, by 2018 4.57 million, 2020 9 million , and 2024, 36 million.
There's a lot of space to grow and a lot of time to pass in which numerous innovations could come to existance, sidechains, lightning networks are a few 'transaction offloading schemes we've seen recently. I am not worried about scalability just yet. Counterparty does not have to be used as a real time trading layer when that could be offloaded through gateways, it can be used as a final clearing, netting and settlement layer- or as an initial asset issuance/ equity ownership database for example.
. And besides, off-chain transactions and Ripple gateway usage gives you real-time transactions. Therefore, 10 minute block times are a feature, not an issue.