🧩 The Blockchain Trilemma

If you’ve been around crypto long enough, you’ve heard of the Blockchain Trilemma. Vitalik Buterin popularized it years ago as the impossible triangle. You can only optimize for two out of three things at once: scalability, security, decentralization.

Think of it like ordering at a fast-food joint: cheap, tasty, healthy. Pick two.

Most projects accepted this so-called law of physics and built around it. Bitcoin doubled down on decentralization and security. Ethereum leaned toward scalability and security, but at the cost of true decentralization. Meanwhile, a whole wave of so-called Ethereum killers sprinted for scalability (hi Solana) but often tripped over outages, centralization, or both.

The trilemma became the excuse for every tradeoff in crypto. “Yeah, we go down twice a month, but it’s fast!” Or: “Yeah, transactions take 40 minutes, but it’s secure!”

But here’s the thing: what if the trilemma is not actually a law? What if it has just been a design limitation of blockchains until now?

🚦 Bitcoin: The Safe but Slow Lane

Bitcoin is the classic example. It is incredibly secure thanks to proof-of-work and a massive hashrate, and highly decentralized with thousands of nodes worldwide. But scalability? Forget it. Bitcoin still pushes out around seven transactions per second, which in 2025 feels like trying to send an email through a fax machine.

Supporters cope by reframing it as a feature. “Bitcoin isn’t supposed to be fast, it’s digital gold.” Fair enough. But that is not really solving the scalability issue, it is sidestepping it.

🛠 Ethereum: The Eternal Work-in-Progress

Ethereum positioned itself as the world’s programmable blockchain, but in the trilemma it leaned toward scalability and security while giving up a good chunk of decentralization. The high hardware requirements for validators and the heavy reliance on centralized infrastructure like Infura make it clear that Ethereum is not as open or distributed as many believe.

On paper, Ethereum is working toward solving its limits with Proof-of-Stake, rollups, and eventually sharding. In practice, the network often feels like a never-ending construction zone. Gas fees spike, transactions clog, and users are left wondering if this highway is ever going to open fully.

Ethereum remains the most important smart contract platform, but its place in the trilemma shows the same pattern: you get two out of three, not all three.

🚀 Solana and Friends: Fast, Until It Isn’t

Projects like Solana chased scalability with a vengeance, cranking throughput into the thousands of transactions per second. But this came at a cost. The network demands high-end hardware for validators, which reduces decentralization. In other words, only a smaller, more centralized set of participants can realistically keep the network running.

The result is a Formula 1 blockchain: insanely fast when it works, but prone to network outages and downtime. Solana fans shrug and reboot their nodes, but the truth is clear — scalability often came at the expense of decentralization.

Meanwhile, other “Ethereum killers” followed a similar path, chasing speed while compromising on trust and openness. The trilemma has been holding most projects hostage ever since.

⚡️ Enter Kaspa: The Trilemma Breaker?

Kaspa does not use a traditional blockchain. Instead, it leverages a blockDAG (Directed Acyclic Graph of blocks). Rather than waiting for one block at a time to be mined in a strict chain, Kaspa allows multiple blocks to be created in parallel and then orders them afterward using clever math.

Think of it like upgrading from a single-lane road to a multi-lane highway. Cars can drive side by side without waiting in line.

This architecture allows Kaspa to achieve:

• Scalability: high throughput with sub-second confirmation times

• Security: still secured by proof-of-work and a growing hashrate

• Decentralization: lightweight nodes can run on regular hardware, keeping it accessible to many

In other words, Kaspa is quietly cheating the trilemma. It is not just choosing two out of three. It is attempting to deliver all three at once.

🎭 Why This Matters

If Kaspa or any blockDAG project proves it can scale without sacrificing security or decentralization, the trilemma stops being an immutable law and starts looking like an excuse used by blockchains that did not innovate.

Imagine if the Wright brothers had said, “Sorry, you cannot fly and land safely. Physics says pick one.” The trilemma might be the same kind of myth: a constraint of early design, not a limitation of reality.

😏 The Punchline

Crypto has lived with the trilemma for over a decade. Bitcoiners cope by calling it a feature. Ethereum devs cope by writing endless roadmaps. Solana fans cope by restarting Discord every time the network halts.

Kaspa? It just keeps quietly building a system where you don’t have to cope at all.

Maybe the trilemma wasn’t a law of nature. Maybe it was just a lack of imagination.

~Fritz