Scaling works best with traditional databases. However, from a security standpoint, scalable blockchains are way more useful and pragmatic — but there is a trade-off involved.
When importing the concept of scalability in the context of blockchain technology, it should be highlighted that since blockchain systems are already distributed networks, it is difficult to increase a network’s overall throughput by simply adding more hardware entities — such as miners, nodes or validators — to it.
To be a bit more specific, while horizontal scaling tends to increase the trust or security of a network, it generally results in the overall performance (transaction processing capacity) of the system being degraded.
On the other hand, vertical scaling generally means making each internal component of a system faster and stronger. This, from the standpoint of a distributed ledger-based system, implies the use of supercomputer nodes. However, the downside to all this is that only a selected few individuals are capable of running such nodes.