Inside the blockchain developers’ mind: What is the ultimate scaling solution?

Cointelegraph is following the development of an entirely new blockchain from inception to the mainnet and beyond through its series, Inside the Blockchain Developer’s Mind, written by Andrew Levine of Koinos Group.

Scalability is a popular topic in blockchain, but few ever explain what we mean by that term. When we at Koinos Group talk about scaling what we mean is scaling to the masses. Creating a blockchain that everyone on Earth can use. That means the blockchain network has to be able to support that level of load, which is typically what people mean when they refer to scalability.

User experience matters

But what they talk about far less is the obvious implication that you must have a user experience that everyone on Earth can find pleasurable. Terrible user experiences are infinitely scalable because there is no demand for bad user experiences and the underlying network resources required to deliver them.

This is demonstrated by the fact that when most projects talk about scaling, they talk about technical implementations like sharding, proof-of-history, or layer 2, which are the solutions that Ethereum is using to solve its scaling challenges.

These projects are responding to Ethereum’s scaling constraints by trying to integrate those scaling solutions sooner, but are failing to realize that those solutions only make sense in Ethereum’s context as not only the first general-purpose blockchain but the one with the most developer adoption in the world.

Ethereum: The first mover

When Ethereum was released, it gave developers, for the first time ever, the ability to develop applications on a shared blockchain platform using a programming language very similar to the ones they were already using to build applications; a Turing complete programming language. Compared to the developer experience of building applications on other blockchains, building on Ethereum was a quantum leap that made it faster, easier and cheaper to build decentralized applications. Thanks to this unparalleled user experience, the usage of Ethereum grew at a high rate. Demand for Ethereum’s resources has outstripped supply, which has led to an increase in demand for gas, and a corresponding price increase, making all Ether (ETH) holders very happy.

The Ethereum developers and stakeholders do not want to eliminate fees or even necessarily reduce them. That would be like oil producers wanting to reduce the price of oil. If there is surplus demand for their network resources, they don’t care about creating a better user experience, they care about increasing supply (scaling) while maintaining the existing user experience.

But that is Ethereum! The 900-pound gorilla of general-purpose blockchains with first mover advantage, incredible developer adoption and unfathomable capital investment. It is a successful platform and its plans for scaling make perfect sense for Ethereum. But they make no sense for platforms that have no usage and no developer adoption.

This is why we see so many projects pursuing labor intensive and risky efforts like bridges to Ethereum in an attempt to siphon users off of Ethereum to trigger the growth they need to justify their scaling solutions!

Reasoning from analogy

But this is classic reasoning from analogy as opposed to reasoning from first principles; making decisions based on what everyone else is doing instead of focusing on the problem you want to solve and the most efficient path for developing a solution based on fundamental truths. Thinking that the way to scale a new blockchain is sharding because sharding is the way to scale Ethereum is a perfect example of reasoning from analogy.

At Koinos Group, we’re approaching this problem from first principles. Scaling to the masses is not about integrating some magical technology that overnight supports everyone and…