Scale out, not up - Dr Gavin Wood
@Polkadot is scaled out to 100 cores+ whose transactions are secured by its crypto-economic security. The Polkadot Supercomputer (JAM) will scale out to even more cores, and the JAM grid will scale out to a cryptoeconomically secure cluster of Polkadot supercomputers, ready to compete with the scaling capabilities of Web2.
But why does it matter whether a Network scales out or up?
Okay, here's the thing...
There are generally two scaling mechanisms that blockchains use to scale their networks:
- Horizontal scaling (scaling out)
- Vertical scaling (scaling up)
How do these 2 differ?
When you scale up, you're essentially trying to squeeze as much computational power as possible from a single machine to process transactions more efficiently. This can be done by software hyper-optimizations, internal parallelization, etc.
A typical example is the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM).
While this may help the chain scale, hyper-optimization of a single machine leads to expensive hardware requirements.
And you can only push the capabilities of a single machine so far without sacrificing cost and accessibility, and consequently centralizing nodes to a few rich players (which in itself violates the ethos of a truly decentralized Web3)
But when you scale out, you're splitting the workload across multiple machines. You don't need to massively optimize hardware to scale more... what you need is more people running more machines. This ensures that the network remains cost-efficient to maintain, without sacrificing decentralization.
And here's a bonus!
when a network is scaled out. It could easily scale up a bit in the future, such that a small optimization in the machines could result in an exponential increase in the scaling capabilities of the network.
This is why the Polkadot Network is the closest to achieving Web2 scale, without compromising resilience and decentralization.
