Like most things in life, Blockchain too has an optimisation problem which is known as the Blockchain Trilema. What is the problem?
The blockchain trilemma is the concept that decentralization, security and scalability can’t all be represented in one blockchain. The term blockchain trilemma was coined by Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum. Developers worldwide are experimenting by applying different scalability solutions and consensus mechanisms, including sharding and state channels.
The three elements of the blockchain trilemma are decentralization, security, and scalability. The perfect blockchain boasts all three elements, but finding a balance between the three is difficult and presents a problem. For instance, it would be fantastic to have all credit card transactions flow on the blockchain network but why haven’t that happened already? Simply because, while maintaining Decentralisation and Security the Scalability suffers and suffers massively!. For perspective, the most common decetralised & secure blockchain application- the Bitcoin blockchain had a disk size of 406.05 gigabytes on July 10, 2022!!. Just imagine the problems such huge disk and data requirement this poses for Scalability. Every node that you add to the network, thereby improving the network’s security will require that diskspace. It is not easy to have such a distributed large network where every node can spare that kind of hardware resource. Also, it makes things painfully slow. For eg the block time (Time it takes to add a bloick in a blockchain) is about 10 minutes forBitcoin blockchain. Just imagine how slow would it be if we wanted to have all credit card or banking transactions on something like a Bitcoin blockchain.
Now, ofcourse there are optimisation solutions for this problem. Some possible solutions include sharding, sidechains etc where one can focus on the more critical requirements, while kind of compromising on others. In essence, a simple Blockchain is not the solution to all use cases. Will talk about a few of these solutions in the next one.
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