Blockchain scaling· 8 min read
Speed, decentralisation, security, cost, privacy, following the rules, and being usable by someone who is not technical. You cannot max out all of them at once, and this paper is about which trade-offs matter here.
The summary above is the current state of it. The full post goes up once the work behind it is finished and reviewed, which is the same rule we apply to everything else on the site.
Back to all postsBlockchain Trilemma · System Trade-offs
Throughput limits, block capacity, congestion, fees that jump around, and confirmation times. Many small frequent transfers turn out to be a hard traffic pattern for a base layer to handle.
· 9 min read
Doubling the shards roughly doubles the capacity, but only for transfers that stay inside one shard. A remittance has three parties by default, so it is cross-shard from the start, and adding shards makes that more likely rather than less.
· 9 min read
A sidechain is fast because it runs on its own small validator set, and that is the same reason Ronin lost $625 million. Whether one could carry remittances comes down to whether its validators, its bridge and its settlement are chosen on purpose rather than inherited.
· 9 min read
