average hard drives over the last 16 years has doubled every 2 years
3,6,12,24,48,96,192,384,765
yea some people in 2000 had 2gb hard drives some had 4gb hard drives
yea some people in 2016 have 500gb hard drives, some have 1tb hard drives.
but an increase of doubling every 2 years is a natural rise.. even satoshi envisioned that (every 105,000 blocks).. then people complaining about bloat wont complain about it as they will be getting larger hard drives to compensate
i agree that it wont suddenly make bitcoin handle visa transaction volumes in 6 months.. but thats because people are not realising how fake visa's suggested volume is.. especially when visa's system is not actually one system, but multiple separate systems with mutliple separate databases. and thus their actual handling of tx's per system is far far less.. and thus far less to worry about.
especially anytime right now.
and the reason most people are waiting more than 10 minutes per block is not to do with bloat.. its to do with miners limiting transactions out of greed..
https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size?timespan=30days0.75mb is the average maximum... not 0.99mb
meaning on average there is plenty of room for more transactions per block... if only the miners would stop being greedy and just accept all transactions and stop blaming other reasons..
orphans only happen because miners do not stale their attempts when a competing block is solved.. this has nothing to do with transaction numbers. but more to do with miners greed hoping that if they push on and continue to solve their block, and then push on and hope to solve the next block before anyone else.. their previous block becomes valid and the competitors block becomes the orphan..
if miners just accepted transactions as they come and then stale their attempts if a competitor solves first.. then transactions wont get delayed and orphans wont happen.. its just that simple.. greed is the blame not bloat.