Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted a lengthy paper on the limit to blockchain scalability, criticizing claims made by Tesla CEO Elon Musk. He suggests Sharded blockchains can scale much further rather than just forking a blockchain.
The Article published on Vitaliks personal blog on May 23 highlight tradeoff between decentralization and scalability in architecting blockchain network. The article comes in response to Elon Musk’s tweet on May 16, that Dogecoin will emerge as the leading chain if it moves to increase its block size by 900%:
Vitalik challenges Musk’s suggestion underlining the challenge to accomplish sharp expansion in scalability. According to him without leading to extreme centralization and compromising the fundamental properties that make a blockchain what it is? If not, how far can you go? What if you change the consensus algorithm? Even more importantly, what if you change the technology to introduce features such as ZK-SNARKs or sharding?
He highlights that It’s crucial for blockchain decentralization for regular users to be able to run a node. Vitalicks main point on decentralized as a means to reduce security risk and network failures.
He highlights that It’s crucial for blockchain decentralization for regular users to be able to run a node using an example of consensus failure in blockchain, He states that even though it is unclear when the threshold of herds immunity against coordinated attacks kicks in but, having more nodes is good.
Then he explains the three key limitations of a node to process a large number of transactions. How interaction affects these three types’ costs. How these factors affect Ethereum?
Also Read: Proof Of Stake Reducing Carbon Emissions Of Ethereum And Makes It More Environment Friendly
What happens after sharding?
Sharding fundamentally gets around the above limitations, because it decouples the data contained on a blockchain from the data that a single node needs to process and store. He explains how Sharding works and how it will benefit Ethereum and other blockchains.
“The Ethereum sharding design is actually already roughly targeted fairly close to reasonable maximum safe values.”
