Scaling Blockchains Without Giving up Decentralization and Security
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Public blockchains should be able to scale with respect to the number of nodes and to the transactions load. Despite the large research and experimental effort, all known approaches turn out to be tradeoffs that sacrifice security or decentralization to achieve scalability. Actually, the blockchain scalability trilemma has been informally proposed. This is related to scalability, security and decentralization, stating that any improvement in one of these aspects should negatively impact on at least one of the other two aspects. We introduce a new blockchain architecture that scales to arbitrarily high transactions workload provided that a corresponding proportional increment of nodes is provided. In this scalability process, no tradeoff on security or decentralization is required. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first result of this kind. While our result is currently only theoretic, we believe that our approach could stimulate significant practical contributions.
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