Hey u/Simius I'll try to answer your questions with three things that Ethereum does different than Bitcoin and affect scalability:
Higher block frequency: Ethereum creates a block every 15 secs. Bitcoin every 10 minutes. Mind you, an ETH block much smaller in data than a BTC block;
Block size: Ethereum block are, in relative terms, bigger block size + size is adjustable. How is block size adjusted? With the has gas system. Each transactions spends an amount of gas, according to the complexity of the operations is registering (creation/interaction with smart contracts are more costly than standard transfers, and more complex contracts more than simpler). Each block has a "gas limit", that is the maximum amount of gas they can fit. Miners set this gas limit, which determines the number of transactions each block will eventually confirm. Gas limit is probably the single most important factor in scalability (in number of transactions processed and their cost). Right now the gas limit is about 8 million units. One standard transaction is 21000 gas units. So you can fit a max of 380 standard transaction every 15 seconds. That's a total of around 2M standard transactions/day at the current gas limit. But there are a lot of smart contract interactions right now (and it will be more), so the standard size/transaction is bigger. We can say that with 1.2M transactions/day we've reached the max limit if we don't adjust the gas limit. This could be adjusted if you need more capacity, yet a bigger gas limit means more uncles, for a bigger block takes longer to spread through the network because it has more data. Which brings me to the third point.
Management (including rewards) of uncles (in bitcoin terminology orphans). Uncles are blocks that are mined but eventually don't make part of the final blockchain. This blocks receive computation by miners (= cost), so more uncles created higher costs for the miners. A regular mined block (which is included in the chain) receives a reward (now around 3 ETH), in bitcoin this is the only reward per block miners get, in ethereum uncles also receive reward, which incentivizes miners to extend further the processing of transactions, for they have less cost/uncle(orphan). Why are more uncles created when there is higher gas limit? Because if a block has more gas in it, meaning more transactions and more data, it takes longer to propagate through the network, because it has to be registered by all the nodes for confirmation, in the meantime (until confirmation) uncles can be created, increasing their probability. So bigger gas limits, higher probability of uncles, and thus higher probability of emerging costs for miners.
If you're interested further, you can find a lot of information on google on these topics: block time, block size, gas limit, uncles.
There's a variety of information and ongoing research into the topic of scaling with security and decentralization you can read about here https://ethresear.ch
It includes Casper PoS, Sharding, Parallel execution, Plasma and more. What works in practice remains to be seen.
Original article and pictures take www.redditstatic.com site
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