The Collapse of the Blockchain Trilemma: A Formal Analysis through Baran’s Topology and Automata Logic
Dissecting the Blockchain Trilemma: Why Baran’s Multipath Networks and Formal Systems Theory Render It Void
The so-called blockchain trilemma—the assertion that no blockchain system can simultaneously achieve decentralisation, scalability, and security—has been popularised through imprecise language and poorly defined categories. When addressed through formal systems theory, automata models, and network architecture—especially in light of Baran’s 1964 framework for communication networks—this trilemma is revealed not as a constraint but as an artefact of conceptual confusion and engineering failure.
Keywords:
Blockchain trilemma, Baran 1964, decentralisation, scalability, security, network topology, path redundancy, automata theory, formal systems, fault-tolerant design, Merkle proofs, SPV, Nakamoto consensus, graph connectivity, distributed systems, economic incentives, propagation latency, compact block relay, Sybil resistance, cryptographic integrity, network resilience.
I. Decentralisation: Restoring Formal Meaning via Baran 1964
In 1964, long before the carnival barkers of blockchain wrapped themselves in slogans and self-aggrandising manifestos, Paul Baran sliced through the fog with a blade honed by precision. He didn't traffic in abstractions about liberty or whisper adolescent fantasies about leaderless utopia into the ears of gullible technocrats. Baran did something far more dangerous—he measured. He categorised. He applied form to chaos.
He took a system—communication—and cut it into three shapes: centralised, decentralised, and distributed. Not moral positions. Not political ambitions. Shapes. Structures. Embodiments of resilience or collapse.
In the centralised model, one node sits like a dictator enthroned. Remove it, and the whole system keels over like a marionette with its strings severed. This is monarchy in topology—rigid, majestic, and brittle. It doesn’t bend, it doesn’t absorb; it dies with the king.
Decentralised networks are looser, a federation of centres. They offer a buffer. Take out one region and the others limp on, bruised but not broken. It is the network as archipelago—vulnerable only at the bridges, not the islands.
Then comes the distributed network. This is no aristocracy of nodes. No centre to collapse. No master node to assassinate. Instead, every part interlaces with every other. Redundant paths everywhere. It is a mesh, a tapestry, a system with no face to punch and no back to stab. Maximum fault tolerance. Minimal vulnerability.
Baran wasn’t speaking poetry. He was quantifying. He spoke in edges and vertices, in redundancy and multiplicity. He gave us a metric, not a manifesto. He handed us κ(G)—the vertex connectivity of a graph—as a scalpel to cut away illusions. The number of independent paths between two nodes wasn’t just an artefact. It was the definition.
And yet decades later, children in adult suits began shouting “decentralisation” like it was a password to utopia, a key to transcendence, a chant to summon justice. They tied it to who can run a node, how many people validate blocks, or whether the GitHub repo is managed by one or ten or none. They built shrines out of Git commits and crowned themselves stewards of freedom. But they never counted the paths. Never measured the routes. Never looked at the structure, only at the slogans.
A blockchain, if it is anything at all, is a network protocol. Its measure is not its sentiment. Its strength is not in who hosts it, but in how it routes. The ability of a transaction to echo across independent routes, to survive sabotage, to outpace censorship—not the virtue signalling of a thousand idle full nodes—determines its decentralisation.
Do you want to know if your system is decentralised? Don’t ask how many Twitter bios say “validator.” Ask how many disjoint paths a transaction can take from sender to miner. Ask whether the failure of one path reroutes the message or buries it. Ask if Byzantine faults are routed around like floodwaters finding new paths through stone.
Because decentralisation is not democracy. It is engineering.
Baran understood this. He dealt in survivability, not slogans. He made no speeches about egalitarianism. He asked, simply: how many links must you sever before the message dies? That is decentralisation. Everything else is performance art.
So when the blockchain trilemma—this slouched chimera of contradiction—howls about the supposed impossibility of combining security, scalability, and decentralisation, know this: it speaks of a decentralisation that never existed. Not the one Baran measured. Not the one that survives failure. But a phantom born of hand-waving and marketing. A religion with no god, just worshippers.
We do not live in the world of ideals. We live in the world of measurable paths, of timed propagation, of fault domains and latency boundaries. Those who pretend otherwise are not visionaries—they are liars in love with the sound of their own echo.
Baran gave us a ruler. And with it, we can measure their fraud.
II. Automata and System State: Logical Structure of the Blockchain
Strip away the techno-religious affectations, the priesthood of Core developers and the incense-burning acolytes of “decentralisation,” and you’re left with a machine—one that functions, not one that feels. The blockchain, in its essence, is not a belief system. It is a deterministic automaton. Nothing more. Nothing less.
It is best defined formally:
𝑀 = (𝑄, Σ, δ, 𝑞₀)
Where:
𝑄 is the set of all possible ledger states—potentially infinite, depending on transaction volume and time horizon.
Σ is the input alphabet—the set of all valid transactions that can be applied.
δ is the transition function—the rules by which a block alters the ledger state, consuming a set of transactions and producing a new state.
𝑞₀ is the genesis block—the pristine, initial condition of the machine.
This is not metaphor. This is automata theory. This is how real systems are modelled when the gods are dead and only structure remains.
Security in this frame is not a mystical property—it is the preservation of invariants through the transitions of δ. The system is secure if, no matter how many transactions you throw at it, or how they’re sequenced in Σ, the outputs of δ maintain logical consistency. No double-spends. No broken balances. No state corruption.
Scalability, by contrast, is defined not by opinion or aspiration, but by bounded complexity. If δ can process larger Σ with manageable computational load—if δ(Σ₁), δ(Σ₂), ..., δ(Σₙ) can be applied in linear or sublinear time—then the system scales. Full stop.
And where, exactly, in this rigorously defined automaton does “decentralisation” appear?
It doesn’t.
Because decentralisation—as it’s screamed from the rooftops by ideologues—is not part of the machine. It is not encoded into δ. It is not defined within 𝑄 or Σ. It is not anchored to 𝑞₀. It exists, if at all, in the physical instantiation of the network—in the relay topology, in the propagation logic, in the multiple routes that Σ may take before arriving at δ.
You can graft Baran’s structure onto the propagation layer. You can measure path redundancy, fault resistance, average hop distance. But the automaton itself? Indifferent. Its logic is cold, immutable, perfect. It does not care if a block is delivered by an oligarch, an anarchist, or a hamster running BGP over Morse code.
This is what the trilemma’s false prophets never understood:
The core protocol does not know who propagates the transaction.
It only knows whether δ accepts it.
To argue that decentralisation is an intrinsic variable in the blockchain's logical design is to argue that theology belongs in mathematics. That sentiment belongs in code. It’s the same fallacy that builds cathedrals on computation—when what’s needed is a blueprint.
Build your automaton. Define δ well. And let Σ flow through any damn network you want—as long as the message gets there, and the machine transitions as it should.
This is not a system of dreams. It is a system of logic. And logic, like the truth, doesn’t care how you feel about it.
III. Scalability and Multipath Propagation: No Logical Barrier
Scalability, when stripped of its marketing perfume, is the raw and brutal capacity of a system to perform—consistently, efficiently—as the weight upon it grows without bound. Formally:
|Σ| → ∞
The size of the input space, the alphabet of transactions, expands. The question is not whether the machine breathes ideology, but whether it processes—without suffocating.
Now enter the trilemma, clumsy and bloated, claiming that scalability must kneel before the altar of decentralisation. It asserts that as decentralisation increases, scalability decays. But this is not an axiom. It’s a mistake masquerading as inevitability.
It is a non sequitur, a leap over logic’s corpse.
The error lies in the redefinition of decentralisation as uniform duplication—the idea that every participant must store everything, validate everything, broadcast everything. This is not decentralisation. It is replication. And replication is not resilience—it is entropy.
Baran—clear, dry, precise—did not define distribution by sameness. He defined it by multiplicity of path, by connectivity that refuses to be severed. High κ (vertex-connectivity) and λ (edge-connectivity) are not burdens. They are blessings. In graph-theoretic reality, more paths means faster propagation, better survivability, more fault tolerance. The message doesn’t slow. It speeds up. Like water finding cracks, it surges forward even as the dam tries to hold.
So let us return to the system that began this all: Bitcoin. Not the one patched and mutated by those who didn’t understand it—but the one described in its original white paper, in the lines most never read:
Section 8: Simplified Payment Verification.
SPV.
A client doesn’t download the world. It asks for a proof. A Merkle branch. A hash path from a transaction to a known block header.
𝑡 → ℎ₀ ⊕ ℎ₁ ⊕ ⋯ ⊕ ℎₙ → 𝐵ₖ
It doesn’t need to carry the weight of the chain. It doesn’t need to know every node in the net. It merely needs enough connectivity—enough relay density—to find a valid proof path. Validation becomes separable from storage. Topology is decoupled from logic.
This, in its barest bones, is Baran’s vision. Multiple paths. Redundant nodes. Survivability through structure. Not monolithic duplication. Not ideological purity. A system that routes and routes again until the signal finds its destination.
So when the trilemma declares, with the confidence of a priest and the ignorance of a drunk, that decentralisation limits scalability, what it truly proclaims is that its architects have failed to design with intent. They mistook load-bearing for inclusion, and redundancy for equity. They mistook topology for theology.
The truth is brutal, crystalline, and liberating:
Scalability requires structure—not dogma.
And structure—multipath, high-connectivity, proof-based validation—is exactly what Baran taught us to build.
If your system breaks when decentralised, it is not because you scaled wrong.
It is because you never understood decentralisation in the first place.
IV. The Security Fallacy: Cryptographic Integrity is Orthogonal
Security—real security, not the sentimental version peddled in marketing decks—is not some ethereal state of collective harmony. It is the ability of a system to preserve the correctness of its state transitions in the face of deceit, disorder, and failure. In a blockchain, this security emerges from three cold mechanisms:
‣ Economic alignment: the cost of deception must outweigh the benefits. A miner who spends more to rewrite history than they stand to earn will fail economically, not morally.
‣ Cryptographic invariance: hash preimage resistance ensures that a block's contents cannot be manipulated without detection. It is physics-as-truth: irreversible computation.
‣ Temporal anchoring: the longest chain rule under proof-of-work pins the state of the system to the expenditure of time and energy. It is not timekeeping—it is time-burning.
This triad governs the machine’s trustworthiness. It does not care if the machine is replicated across one node or a million. The correctness of a transaction’s inclusion, the irreversibility of a spent coin, the anchoring of a new state—none of these depend on the number of ears listening. They depend on the consistency of rules and the hardness of cost.
The trilemma, in its grotesque oversimplification, implies a ludicrous chain of causality:
More nodes → Slower propagation → Lower throughput → Weakened security
This is cargo cult reasoning. It equates node count with latency, latency with performance, and performance with attack surface. At every link, the logic fails.
A resilient network—built on multiple redundant paths, per Baran’s principles—does not suffer from propagation. It benefits from it. Messages don’t get stuck; they detour. The system doesn’t stall; it routes.
What the trilemma’s defenders forget—or never learned—is that we are not limited to brute-force broadcast. The original Bitcoin model anticipated this:
‣ Transaction aggregation reduces network load.
‣ Compact block relay transmits only deltas, not full data.
‣ Tree-synchronised Merkle propagation ensures validators reconstruct blocks efficiently from fragments.
‣ Non-validating relays, operating like routers not judges, can flood transactions without ever checking their semantic content.
A system can scale and remain secure by optimising transmission, not duplicating it. It can preserve cryptographic integrity without flooding every full node with a full copy of the truth.
Security is orthogonal to network density. It lives in the invariants, not in the bandwidth.
So the idea that redundancy somehow weakens the system is not just wrong. It’s backwards.
Baran proved this decades ago: redundancy resists failure. It doesn't invite it.
If your security degrades when you add paths, the problem is not in decentralisation. The problem is in your protocol. In your inability to route, to prune, to verify at edge without choking at centre.
Security is not a function of how many see. It is a function of what cannot be unseen.
And what cannot be reversed.
And what cannot be faked.
The blockchain is secure because its logic is bound to reality—economically, cryptographically, temporally.
Not because a crowd is watching.
But because the machine doesn’t flinch.
V. Economic Rationality: A Non-topological Coordination Layer
The blockchain trilemma, so often paraded as gospel, forgets the one force that never forgets: incentive. It speaks as if topology exists in a vacuum, as if nodes are idle participants in a sterile graph, unaware of time, cost, or profit. It dreams of structure but denies strategy. It diagrams connections without understanding why they connect.
But the blockchain is not built in empty space. It is built in the arena of economic combat. Every node is a competitor, every miner a strategist, every message a wager. The system is not a map. It is a game—and the game has rules.
In such a rational game, behaviours do not emerge from ideology. They emerge from return-on-effort. Bitcoin understood this. It didn’t preach cooperation. It embedded equilibrium.
‣ Rational nodes propagate valid blocks swiftly, not out of virtue, but because every second wasted is a second lost to a faster rival. Delay risks orphaning. Orphaning costs money.
‣ Rational clients connect to multiple peers, not to decentralise the world, but to get the truth faster. If one connection fails, another supplies the data. It’s not philosophy. It’s uptime.
‣ Rational miners build atop the most profitable chain, not because they’re honest, but because dishonesty that doesn’t pay is indistinguishable from failure. A block on the wrong fork is a monument to economic self-destruction.
These actions are not suggestions. They are emergent strategies dictated by the structure of reward. In this system, Baran’s vision of distributed robustness is not utopian—it’s optimal.
Why? Because reducing propagation delay reduces financial risk. The faster a block spreads, the lower the chance it gets orphaned. Thus, multipath relaying—having many routes, many peers, many redundant conduits—is not an ideological good. It is a survival mechanism.
In this way, economic pressure bends topology. Nodes arrange themselves not by central planning but by competitive advantage. The overlay network becomes shaped by latency, bandwidth, and payoff—not by rhetoric. Relay density emerges as a rational adaptation.
And this is the final nail in the trilemma’s coffin. It treats decentralisation, scalability, and security as if they’re fixed axes in a rigid triangle. But the triangle is dynamic. And economic gravity pulls it into new shapes.
The system doesn’t break because it's decentralised.
It decentralises because breaking is unprofitable.
It scales because speed pays.
It secures because lies are too expensive to sustain.
The trilemma, in its blindness to incentive, overlooks the most important layer of all: the one where humans act to preserve their advantage, even if it means serving the system they did not choose to trust.
Because in Bitcoin, you don’t need to trust the system.
You just need to trust your wallet balance.
And that kind of trust—the kind born from calculation, not ideology—is the only kind that lasts.
VI. Counterexample: Bitcoin with Large Blocks and Redundant Paths
𝐕𝐈. 𝐂𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐱𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞: 𝐁𝐢𝐭𝐜𝐨𝐢𝐧 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐋𝐢𝐦𝐢𝐭, 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐑𝐞𝐝𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐏𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐬
Let us now speak without pretense, without genuflection to the false prophets of “inevitability.” Consider not a hypothetical but a living counterexample: a blockchain protocol that imposes no block size limit—not four gigabytes, not one, but none. The ceiling is gone. The governor stripped from the engine. There is no pre-assumed upper bound, no baked-in constraint passed off as prudence. The only limit is capacity, as determined by engineering—not committee.
In this system, the block size is not a moral question. It is not voted upon like a motion in some digital parliament. It is tested, measured, and pushed. If miners can propagate it, validate it, mine it, and profit from it, then it goes through. If they cannot, it does not. There is no bureaucracy, no capricious core team clutching configuration files like sacred scrolls. There is only throughput and acceptance, encoded in cost.
And this is paired—surgically, not sentimentally—with the original design of Simplified Payment Verification. SPV. Merkle proofs. Section 8 of the white paper, the part that almost no one implements because it denies them control. Clients verify without duplication. They are light, fast, and free. They do not pretend that verification and consensus are synonymous. They do not equate size with safety.
Blocks are relayed compactly. Differential transmission. Headers first, transactions as needed, trees synchronised via hashes. You do not download the ark when all you need is the dove. And these blocks, limitless in potential, do not travel along narrow, fragile paths. They traverse a Baran-style web, a multipath structure of redundancy—redundancy not as bloat, but as resilience. If one path chokes, another takes the load. If a node drops, the message reroutes. This is not theory. This is functioning topology.
Inside, the protocol is parallelised. Transactions are batched. Validation threads split and devour their workloads concurrently. The UTXO set is processed in segments, not linearly like some monastic scribe copying one entry at a time. The machine hums—not as metaphor, but as mechanism.
And what do we find?
— It scales, because it is not artificially throttled by consensus dogma.
— It secures, because proof-of-work anchors every transition in economic cost.
— It persists, because the network does not depend on uniformity but on diversity of route.
There is no trilemma here. No triangle to bow before.
Scalability is not sacrificed to security.
Security is not sacrificed to participation.
Participation is not sacrificed to throughput.
This protocol—Bitcoin, unmutated—is the counterexample.
It is the proof that the trilemma is not a law, but a failure of imagination.
A map drawn by those too timid to travel.
A boundary built by those who mistook their own incompetence for universal truth.
Let them hold their triangle close like a childhood blanket.
Meanwhile, this system—the one without limits—scales into reality.
Not by compromise.
But by design.
The Blockchain Trilemma as a Category Error and Logical Fallacy
The so-called “blockchain trilemma”—which posits that a distributed ledger system cannot simultaneously achieve scalability, security, and decentralisation—is a conceptual construction that collapses under formal scrutiny. When decentralisation is defined with rigour, as Baran (1964) proposed—specifically, in terms of path multiplicity, network connectivity, and fault-tolerant message delivery—rather than by vague notions of political equity or node equality, the purported trade-offs disintegrate. The trilemma is not a constraint derived from formal principles, but rather a rhetorical artefact assembled from loosely defined terms and misapplied intuition. This is not a case of engineering necessity, but of analytical error.
Formally, each component of the trilemma is situated in a distinct semantic and computational domain. Security, within the context of distributed consensus protocols, is a logical predicate defined over state transition functions. Let 𝑀 = (𝑄, Σ, δ, 𝑞₀) be a deterministic ledger automaton. Then security is the property that ∀σ ∈ Σ, ∀𝑞 ∈ 𝑄, the application of δ(𝑞, σ) ∈ 𝑄 preserves safety and liveness invariants (e.g., no double spends, consistency, finality under adversarial conditions). Scalability is not a logical property but a performance function over resource growth: it describes the boundedness of computational and network cost, such as O(f(|Σ|)), as |Σ| → ∞. Decentralisation, as framed by Baran, is a topological measure—quantifiable via graph-theoretic properties such as vertex-connectivity κ(G) and edge-connectivity λ(G)—concerning how resilient the network is to link or node failures, and how many independent paths exist between participants.
The trilemma equivocates across ontological levels. It presents three incommensurate properties—one logical, one computational, and one topological—as if they were competing variables within a shared design space. But a valid trade-off presupposes a shared dimension of analysis or a formal constraint that imposes mutual exclusivity. No such constraint exists. Security is a function of δ and its invariants; scalability is a function of δ’s complexity and protocol-level message passing; decentralisation is a function of message relay topology and the underlying fault graph. Their interaction is not logically adversarial—they are orthogonal properties. The trilemma asserts incompatibility without first establishing a unifying theoretical framework within which such incompatibility could be proven.
Furthermore, the trilemma embeds an implicit non sequitur. It suggests the existence of a causal chain, typically phrased as: “increased decentralisation implies more nodes → more redundancy → slower propagation → reduced throughput → degraded security.” This is fallacious on multiple grounds. First, it assumes that increased node count necessarily results in uniform validation and redundant broadcast, when in practice, architectures such as Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) and Merkle-proof based clients disaggregate validation from data storage. Second, it conflates network latency with protocol throughput, despite the availability of compact block relay, transaction batching, and tree-synchronised propagation. These mechanisms permit high relay efficiency in topologies with large node counts and high connectivity. Third, it assumes that slower propagation leads to a loss of security, failing to distinguish between consensus latency and consensus safety. The latter is preserved under longest-chain PoW rules so long as adversaries do not achieve majority hashpower, irrespective of propagation speed.
By mischaracterising decentralisation as a performance bottleneck and failing to distinguish logical invariants from physical relay phenomena, the trilemma commits both category error and fallacy of composition. It attributes to the whole system limitations that emerge only under specific, ill-designed implementations—namely, those that equate decentralisation with redundant full-node replication. This is not a logical necessity but a consequence of poor protocol design.
Finally, the existence of counterexamples—systems that scale without compromising on protocol-defined security and that implement Baran-style fault-tolerant relaying—constitutes a falsification in the Popperian sense. If ∃S such that Secure(S) ∧ Scalable(S) ∧ Baran-Distributed(S), then the universal claim of the trilemma is disproven. Such systems exist: Bitcoin, when implemented according to its original design principles (e.g. SPV clients, unbounded block sizes, economic relay incentives), meets all three conditions.
Therefore, the blockchain trilemma cannot be salvaged as a formal constraint. It is, at best, a retrospective rationalisation for architectures that failed to account for modular validation, economic network formation, and topological independence. At worst, it is a category mistake perpetuated to obscure the limitations of dominant implementations. When decentralisation is properly defined, and protocol design is grounded in logic rather than ideological nostalgia, the trilemma dissolves—not because it is overcome, but because it was never coherent to begin with.
The Trilemma Was Never a Law—It Was a Category Mistake Dressed as Insight
The blockchain trilemma has long been held up as a design axiom—as if it were some inviolable theorem carved in the bedrock of distributed systems. It asserts with fatalistic solemnity that a ledger can only optimise two of three things: scalability, security, or decentralisation. The claim is not argued so much as recited, a catechism of limitation, a theology of resignation. But when one finally subjects this construct to rigorous analysis—predicate logic, formal systems, network topology, and complexity theory—it does not reveal hidden genius. It collapses. Not with a bang, but with the quiet, shameful thud of ill-defined terms and incompatible categories.
To say a system must trade off among scalability, security, and decentralisation implies that these properties are inherently at odds. But they are not. They do not even live in the same space. Security is a logical predicate over the state transitions of a machine: δ(q, σ) preserves invariants. Scalability is a computational question of how δ behaves asymptotically as |Σ| grows. Decentralisation—when not hijacked by politics or sentiment—is a topological and fault-resilience measure: how many independent paths exist, and how many nodes must fail before the network partitions. These are not three arms of a single axis. They are orthogonal.
The trilemma’s error is not empirical; it is categorical. It conflates logical predicates with performance bounds, and performance bounds with structural redundancy. That is not trade-off. That is confusion. It is like claiming that a car cannot be fast, safe, and red—because you once built a slow, dangerous red car and assumed that was universal.
Worse, it imports a false causal chain: more nodes imply more redundancy, which slows propagation, which hurts performance, which weakens security. Every link in that chain is either technically false or only true under very particular (and usually poor) implementations. Systems designed with intelligent relay strategies—compact blocks, SPV clients, Merkle trees, non-validating routers—accelerate as they scale. Redundancy improves delivery. Density reduces orphan rates. Rational actors, under economic pressure, construct networks that resemble Baran’s fault-tolerant mesh—not out of ideology, but out of self-interest. The fastest relay wins the race to profit.
And then there is the fatal blow: the counterexample. One counterexample is all it takes to dissolve a universal claim. If there exists a blockchain that scales linearly with data, maintains security under adversarial load, and supports topologies that route around failure with minimal performance loss, then the trilemma is not a law. It is a superstition. Bitcoin, implemented as it was originally specified—with no block size limit, with economic relay incentives, with validation outsourced to cryptographic proofs rather than universal replication—is that counterexample.
In truth, the trilemma was not an insight. It was an excuse—an elegant post-hoc rationalisation for why a generation of developers built systems that could not scale, and refused to admit it. It provided a comforting frame to mask their own design errors as fundamental laws of nature.
But engineering is not mythology. Protocols are not faiths. And the real world—brutal, measurable, and governed by cost—does not care what anyone believes is impossible. The trilemma never constrained reality. It only constrained the minds of those who clung to it.
Conclusion
Baran’s 1964 work, sober and indifferent to ideology, gives us the scalpel to dissect the counterfeit. He did not romanticise decentralisation. He defined it—in hard terms, with graphs and failure paths and quantitative thresholds. Not with slogans. Not with egalitarian hymns. But with a topology that survives collapse.
When decentralisation is understood not as the presence of many voices, but as the presence of many paths—measurable, resilient, route-diverse paths—the trilemma is revealed for what it is:
‣ A false triad, birthed not from constraint but from confusion.
‣ A rhetorical artefact, fashioned to excuse brittle architecture and ideological indulgence.
‣ A failure of rigour, not a boundary of design.
No theorem forbids scalability, security, and decentralisation from coexisting. What forbids it is laziness, dogma, and the pathological comfort of small thinking. Those who worship the trilemma do so not because it is true, but because it justifies their failure to create.
Because in reality—measurable, testable, machine-bound reality—decentralisation in the Baranian sense is not the enemy of scalability. It is its enabler. It routes around congestion. It tolerates node failure. It ensures delivery under strain. And it secures the network not by making every participant omniscient, but by making no participant critical.
So the triangle collapses. Not with a bang, not with a scandal, but with a quiet click of logic falling into place. The myth dissolves, not in outrage, but in the dull indifference of truth.
The machine does not care about your diagrams.
It only cares whether it runs.
And it does.
Bravo!