Wait until the 2nd and 3rd world catch up. The developer of good mobile Bitcoin clients could be in for a ride.

The question is "Is Bitcoin ready for the world?"

At the moment, the answer is no.

I, too, am very worried about what problems Bitcoin will have once the tx volume ratchets up from "insignificant" to "trickle".  There's no way in hell it can be used in its current state for general commerce at any reasonable scale.  (I had a someone at work tell me he was good at making websites scale because he made one that could handle a million hits a month.  "Dude... that's barely one request a second, if you're only doing 8hr days.  Real scalability is orders of magnitude past that.")

Speaking of which, I don't know the blockchain well enough to do this, but can anyone tell me what the average transaction size is, in bytes?  If we assume blocks created every 10mins, and multiply by the number of transactions that can fit into a 1meg block, that's our current maximum transaction velocity.  Can it handle the world's commerce?  Could it even handle, say, Taco Bell's transaction velocity?  (Anyone have any figures along those lines?  Googling tells me that one major credit card processor, Ch*se P*ymentech, processes over 1200tx/sec.  Another unattributed statement on a blog claims, "Banks in the US typically process 10,000 credit card transactions per second," which kinda sticks hard in my bullshit filter.)

Of course steps will be taken to improve scalability, but can they keep up well enough, or will there be "outages" of some sort that are significant enough for people to lose confidence in the currency?  (Think "World of Warcraft major release day" or the recent "SimCity" launch, both being large distributed systems with many users and severe problems in scaling to meet load.)  Bitcoin is not centralized like either of those examples, but will that fact help it or hurt when it comes to addressing serious problems?

We can speculate all day long, but in the end, only time will tell...

    +1. Thanks for that gradient vector. I've always thought it might catch in the third world and that could form part of a bedrock of stability for the rest of the system to take off from.

This. Too many scaling problems right now...BTC can barely handle satoshi dice, much less an entire nations economy.

This isn't the problem, its the way the devs are reacting that is the problem. If the devs all decided to figure out a way to expand the capabilities of Bitcoin whilst trying to remain decentralised then we could rest a little easier but this is NOT the case.

Instead we got a witch-hunt against Satoshi Dice with many higher ups advocating a patch to block Satoshi Dice. There reasoning was that S.Dice is spam and they don't like gabling anyway, so its A ok to block them out. This is what will destroy Bitcoin, the selfish selfish devs that think Bitcoins will have value in the future when the network will be useless.

Get this into your head: We value Bitcoin at over $40, because we think that in the future it will be worth a lot more, but if the network can't handle the transaction volume of a small local bank in Australia (where I live) then they will fail, and fail hard.

Some of the devs are deluded that 7 transactions a second will suffice for a digital coin they think should be useful and worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. They say that gold does not have thousands of transactions a second. But they forget. Bitcoin is not a shiny and useful element. Its a decentralised payment and store of value network, and if it take a year to transfer a Bitcoin then they cannot hold value.

Bitcoin can scale up to the world (at least 2000 tx/s) if it's doing financial transactions.

Bitcoin cannot scale up if it needs to do informational transactions (SatoshiDice) or micropayments on top.

And looking at the speed of development (or lack there of) it will never be.  Bitcoin became to big to fast and now vested interest and "religion' keep it stuck.
The protocol is beta and over the last year or two I started to question the possibility of it ever leaving that status behind.

On other hand love the pic, it shows people are willing to accept change  

The world is ready, the people may be, but they still need to be educated a lot

ps: nice pic