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

cointelegraph.com:

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.

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.

Related: Searching deep: The quest for Bitcoin scalability through layer two protocols

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.

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