# The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

<https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/23/scaling.html>

- Host: [vitalik.ca](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/hosts/vitalik.ca/)
- Saved: May 27, 2021 (2021-05-28T01:58:03Z)
- Record: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/0594d46ff7b7/
- JSON: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/0594d46ff7b7.json

## What Jamie wrote

[Vitalik Buterin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalik_Buterin) goes into the fundamentals about scaling blockchain solutions. This is the biggest thing that Ethereum needs to figure out. His approach here is fundamental and not specific to Ethereum.

> There are two ways to try to scale a blockchain: **fundamental technical improvements**, and simply **increasing the parameters**. Increasing the parameters sounds very attractive at first: if you do the math on a napkin, it is easy to convince yourself that a consumer laptop can process thousands of transactions per second, no ZK-SNARKs or rollups or sharding required. Unfortunately, there are many subtle reasons why this approach is fundamentally flawed.

This makes me wonder how other blockchains have gotten to much faster performance. How did they do it? Did they compromise some of these fundamentals?

## Facts

- Kind: [Page](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/page/)

## Appears in

- [WT188: Weekly Thing #188 / Ethereum, Emulator, Ephemerality](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/188/), Notable

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