Too Long; Didn't Read
Sharding is one of the more misunderstood concepts in the Ethereum ecosystem and in blockchain ecosystems more broadly. It refers to a very specific set of ideas with very specific properties. It often gets conflated with techniques that have very different and often weaker security properties. The best way to describe sharding starts from the Scalability Trilemma. Sharding through random sampling has weaker trust properties than the forms of sharding that we are building towards in the ETH ecosystem, but it uses simpler technology. The rest of the post will be describing how sharded blockchains manage to do this.