Time-beacon beats Blockchain Trilemma

Abstract

The Blockchain Trilemma concept highlights the inherent trade-off among security, decentralization, and scalability in blockchain systems, where achieving all three simultaneously is challenging. Blockchain security can be categorized into block security and incentive security, with overall security increasing with the size of block producers. Horizontal scaling of a blockchain, through reducing the size of block producers, can compromise security, while vertical scaling, by increasing the computational requirements for producers, reduces decentralization. Consequently, solving the Blockchain Trilemma while maintaining overall blockchain security is a significant challenge using current methods. This paper introduces a time-beacon scheme to address the Blockchain Trilemma by restructuring the blockchain architecture. We argue that this scheme enables infinite horizontal scalability of the blockchain while preserving security and decentralization.