Why sharding is great: demystifying the technical properties

Very detailed technical post by Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum, describing a sharding approach to improve the scalability of blockchains. The random committee approach he describes is novel and interesting.

Hence, what we do is we randomly split up the work of doing the verification. We randomly shuffle the validator list, and we assign the first 100 validators in the shuffled list to verify the first block, the second 100 validators in the shuffled list to verify the second block, etc. A randomly selected group of validators that gets assigned to verify a block (or perform some other task) is called a committee.

The lengths that public blockchains have to go through to defend against malicious attacks are interesting, and scale is often the thing that is sacrificed. This is a fascinating read on how to get that scale without compromising security.