Why Bitcoin doesn’t need to solve the decentralized, scaling, and security “Trilemma” but Ethereum did

The article analyzes Vitalik Buterin's claim that Ethereum is solving the blockchain trilemma through upgrades like PeerDAS (for data availability sampling) and the eventual adoption of zkEVMs for proof-based validation. PeerDAS, activated via the Fusaka upgrade, allows Ethereum to increase throughput for rollups by having nodes sample data subsets, preventing the workload on regular nodes from exploding, which is crucial for maintaining decentralization. The zkEVM path shifts Ethereum's security reliance toward cryptography and proof verification, enabling higher activity without requiring every validator to re-execute transactions. This evolution forces a collision with Bitcoin's competitive edge, which relies on simplicity, conservatism, and base-layer scarcity. If Ethereum successfully scales data availability while keeping node requirements manageable and trust assumptions intact, it becomes a second credible, high-bandwidth settlement network. This impacts Bitcoin by potentially narrowing its premium block space use cases to high-value settlement, pushing general-purpose applications toward Ethereum's rollup stack, and shifting the centralization battleground to prover markets. Ultimately, Ethereum's pursuit of high-bandwidth scaling clarifies Bitcoin's value proposition as the conservative, predictable monetary anchor, leading to a healthy competition between two different definitions of trust in the crypto space.

(Source：CryptoSlate)