How familiar you are with Graphene, the codebase that powers Bitshares and Steem? I'm not a developer/coder, just a blockchain enthusiast and a big fan of @dan, so I might have little bit biased opinion... but I think Graphene is the best solution so far for the scalability problem.
Here is some information about it from Bitshares website:
@dan is great developer and blockchain designer, but there is one thing which he sucks: marketing. Graphene is amazing piece of technology but it's kind of a hidden gem. Nobody else is interested in it or understands it besides a few Bitshares/Steem core developers.
I would love to see a chat between you and @dan discussing about scalability of blockchains. Maybe some cryptoshow could host that?
+1 for the chat/interview/whatever.
Graphene is a permissioned blockchain (only specific and known parties, here called witnesses, are allowed to write), while Bitcoin is an open blockchain, where you don't need to have any clue to know who the miners are. Satoshi's innovation was all about trustless consensus. Graphene is a variant of the Paxos algorithm and could have existed for around 20 years already.