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There is one transaction block issued every 10 minutes. It can be no larger than 1 MB in size. Miners typically prioritise transactions with higher transaction fees. When block space becomes scarce, transactions with low or no fee will have to wait in line longer.

The current plan seems to be to start increasing the block size limit by 50% per year in order to allow higher transaction volume. Block size limit has always been a contentious issue.

>There is one transaction block issued every 10 minutes.

Just to clarify for anyone new to bitcoin... blocks aren't "issued" every 10 minutes exactly. On average there is a new block found every 10 minutes (or so).

There are various ideas for the future. See this https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/e20c3b5a1d4b97f79ac2 for example.

Actually the blockchain's size is now over 20GB. Almost a year ago I remember it about 13GB!

The slow growth at the moment is because there is almost no transaction volume. If we scale bitcoin up to Visas transaction levels for 2013 we're looking at 60gigs per day in growth.