I read somewhere that Bitcoin can only handle 7 transactions per second. This works out to 604,800 transactions per day. Visa currently processes about 1,700 transactions per second (and can handle vastly higher amounts than this). This means that the Bitcoin system can handle less than 1/200 of Visa’s current processing output.

Is this correct? I find it hard to believe that so many people would buy into a system that’s so inefficient / unscalable.

Also, if my assumption is correct, suppose there are (on avg) 700 transactions per second during a given 10 min period (i.e, 70 times the max output rate) does this mean we will need to wait 70 * 10 min for all those transactions to be confirmed? If yes, why can’t some evil actor overwhelm (i.e, postpone) the system by submitting thousands of tiny transactions to the network?

Thanks in advance