The Blockchain Trilemma: Can We Have It All?

Introduction

Let’s get serious. You have been in the crypto game for some time, and you may have felt that frustration. You are trying to send out a transaction, the network is busy. The gas fee is higher than the transaction you are trying to send. You wait, watch, and consider your options for an hour to make sure. 

Then you hear someone say, “Yeah, but it’s not as decentralised, and it goes down sometimes.” when looking at a network like Solana which is most definitely substantially cheaper and faster. 

It seems like you have to choose. Do you want something that is slow, but safe? Quick, but a little too centralised? What is happening?

You see my friend, this “trilemma” is none other than the Blockchain Trilemma. The core reason there doesn’t seem to be a perfect Blockchain Network. And, today, we’re going to discuss it - without a bunch of technical terms, just plain English. 

So let’s unpack this “trilemma” thing.

 

Three Big Promises That Every Blockchain Wants to Keep

Think of the perfect blockchain. In my opinion, it has three things down perfectly:

• It is scalable because it is extremely fast and extremely cheap. Like Visa, it can process millions of transactions per second, so you never need to wait, and the fees are extremely low. This is what a genuinely usable financial system would look like to the world.
• It is secure: It is like Fort Knox, but digital. It is virtually impossible to hack, roll back a transaction or shut it down. You can be confident that your stuff is safe.
• That is what a decentralized system is for. Decentralization is what makes crypto crypto. There is nobody in control: no individual, no business, no government. It is thousands of computers, all over the world, that run the system. No one can stop your transaction, and no one can hold your money.

Sounds great, doesn't it? So then, what is the problem?

 

The Heartbreaking Compromise: Why You Have to Pick

The hard truth is, you can't have all three at the same time. Every time you try to make one of them better, it will usually make the other two worse. 

A good way of thinking about it is an automobile. You can have: 

• A really fast race car, efficient, but not very safe for a family road trip.
• A large, safe armored truck, but it's slow and gets horrible gas mileage.
• A low-cost bike for everyone to commute on, but it's not really fast or safe at all.

That is the three-way decision. In blockchain, that's the "pick two" problem. And every project you know of is solving for this choice.

 

Why is it that everything's so darn slow when it comes to scalability?

We said we'd change it, not sit in the waiting room. 

Let's be real: expecting the next billion customers to wait 10 minutes to buy your coffee if you want to onboard them is unrealistic. It is scalability that makes crypto useful for anything and everything from games to social apps. Without scalability, you're just a hobby for tech geeks. 

 

Looking at You Bitcoin: The Digital Postal Service

We love Bitcoin. It's an original. It's also the safest and most decentralised network that has ever been created. But let's not kid ourselves, it's slow. On a bad day, it can process around 7 transactions per second. 

Why? Because to be so safe and decentralised, each one of those thousands of nodes has to verify and agree on every transaction. It is a beautiful, democratic process, but it is like trying to get a large town hall meeting to agree on every single cup of coffee purchased in the city. It is safe, but it is not fast.

 

Cryptocurrency Your Fortress in Security

Stopping hackers is only part of the story.

Security is more than keeping the bad actors out: Security is about basic trust, that the rules of the network won't change on you, that your change is final. And it's possible because of complicated cryptography and consensus mechanisms (i.e. Proof-of-Work) which make it too costly to attack the network.

 

The Trade-Off: The Fortress is Great, but the Drawbridge is Slow

That fantastic security comes with a cost: it takes energy and time to fulfill those complicated checks and balances. You could make the network faster, but if you generate the blocks too quickly, or if you make it easy to be validated, you potentially make it easier for a hacker to gain entry. 

The best thing about Bitcoin is how secure it is but that's the reason it has a serious scaling problem. You sacrifice speed for absolute peace of mind.

 

Decentralisation: That's the whole point, right?

No Authority, No Regulations, All Code

This is why we are here, because when it's fully decentralized, there is no middle man. It is you owning and controlling your own data and your own assets. There are thousands of arbitrary people, like you and I, running nodes, wherever, in a truly decentralized network. It cannot be taken down by the government, it cannot be censored. This is freedom.

 

The "Speed Over Freedom" Deal: We See You, Solana

Now to the other extreme. Solana came screaming out of the gates with tens, and tens, and tens, of thousands of transactions per second. How? In part by deploying some less expensive, super powered validators.

This is the classic trade-off: fewer validators allow the network to coordinate faster, which is a better scaling property, but that also means it is more centralized. If those few validators decide to collude together or the government forces them to collude, now the neutrality of the network is at risk. Fast and exciting, but are you willing to sacrifice some of that “freedom” promise for speed?

 

The Trilemma in Real Life: Your Favourite Blockchains, Exposed

Bitcoin: The Unhackable, Decentralised. Grandpa

Choosing Bitcoin is pretty straightforward: safety and decentralisation take priority. This is where your money can be the safest. It is the base. In order to be what Bitcoin is, it had to sacrifice scalability. It is the wise elderly man who moves slowly. You don't exactly use it to go shopping every day. 

Solana: The Fast Centralized Risk Taker

On the other hand, the most critical aspect of Solana is scalability. It has achieved that at the expense of decentralisation and, as we saw with the outages, perhaps less security for the time being. It is the new kid on the block: flashy, fast. That can be useful, and its been exciting to see, but it has experienced some pain points along the way.

 

So, what are we going to do about it? The Battle for Balance

Layer 2s: Creating Fast Lanes on a Slow Highway

That's when things get clever. Instead of attempting to fix Layer 1, the main highway, projects like Polygon and Arbitrum build "fast lanes" on top of it. They do a lot of the transactions off-chain in these Layer 2 networks, and then, they settle the final outcome on-chain. 

This is a lovely hack for making things scale! But, it's hardly a silver bullet. These fast lanes have their own, less decentralised, security teams - but at the end of the day, they rely on the main chain for their final security. We moved the trilemma, but we did not solve it.

 

Ethereum's Big Glow-Up: Did "The Merge" Make Everything Better?

It was a big breakthrough for Ethereum when it finally made the move to Proof-of-Stake, better known as "The Merge." This made the network some 99% more energy-efficient and set the stage for a big increase in scalability. It was like replacing a car's gas-guzzling V8 engine with a svelte electric powertrain.

But fresh questions came to the surface. Is Proof-of-Stake making the rich richer, therefore centralizing? The trilemma is still here; we're just playing a more complicated game of whack-a-mole.

 

What's next? Is there any hope?

Crystal Ball Time: Will Quantum Computing and AI Save Us?

The future is crazy. Researchers are looking at quantum-resistant cryptography as a means to make security last. Some people dream of AI that might automatically manage the network so that it will be as fast and safe as possible. But are these only going to make things more difficult?

Quantum-proofing may make things take longer; an AI manager might become the new hub of control. There is no end to the game.

 

The Truth: It's a Race That Never Ends

In my mind, the trilemma is not something to be "solved" as if it were a mathematical problem. It's one of these perpetual tensions that drives people to innovate.

In the future, there won't be one blockchain to rule them all. There will be thousands of specialized chains, all interconnected. You could use:

• The Fortress Chain is where your money will be safe.
• The Speed Chain is for playing games.
• The Freedom Chain for your blog that can't be censored.

You'll choose the right tool for the task.

 

What does all of this mean for YOU?

So next time you look into a new project, ask yourself, "How does this project deal with the trilemma?"

So, do not just believe the hype about transactions per second. Ask: "What did they give up for that speed?" De-centralization? "Safety?"

Your superpower is knowing how to deal with this trade-off. It changes you from a passive investor into someone who thinks critically.

The blockchain trilemma is our map. This is what we deal with, and what moves us ahead is the power of our minds. It's a chaotic, annoying, really interesting trip, and you're right here for it.

 

This article is contributed by an external writer: Razel Jade Hijastro.

 

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