As I type BTC prices are bouncing between $7200 and $7400 - so I am going to use $7,300 as a price reference. So let's look what is our current price appreciation that has taken place since the "scaling debate really got heated":
1) $250 - 29.2x
2) $350 - 20.86 x
3) $450 - 16.22 x
So, yeah, these nut job big blockers have been arguing doom and gloom of bitcoin since before $250 and arguing "scale or die" until they have been blue in the face, and the market does not seem to give a ratt's ass about their supposed doom and gloom assessments.
In part, it's because bitcoin is scalable beyond the transaction per second metric.
A blockchain might be doing 50 tx/sec, with 10$ average value per tx.
Another blockchain might be doing 5 tx/sec with 1000$ average value per tx.
Over a year, the first will have done 15.7bn USD in volume, while the second will have done 157.7 bn USD in volume.
There are plenty of blockchains out there who are resembling the first case: Potential for a lot of tx/sec but they are either unused or have very low value. Bitcoin is escalating the avg transaction amount, upwards, thus scaling how much it transacts on a daily, weekly, monthly, or annual basis.
Estimated tx volume, per day, in USD:
https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-usdAccording to the stat, we've gone from transacting 200mn per day to ~2bn USD per day. That's 10x volume scaling in a year, with pretty much the same tx/sec (the bump from Segwit to 4mb is relatively recent so I'm not accounting for that).
At 2bn USD per day, we are talking about 730bn USD per year, which is >2 times what paypal did in 2016 (354bn).
Needless to say that this is also achieved in a manner more economical than paypal, since paypal gets 2-3% of the transacted amount. For 730bn USD transferred it'd take something like 15-25bn USD in fees, plus another 3% for currency exchanges for people transacting in different currencies.
~he is trusted leet core dev brah! 
x2 = moon&mars!! <.< weeeeee 
