The Ethereum community is currently debating a proposal by Vitalik Buterin to increase the network’s gas limit by 33%. This suggestion, made on January 11, aims to enhance network throughput by allowing more transactions per block, potentially raising the limit from 30 million to 40 million.
However, Ethereum developer Marius van der Wijden has highlighted significant concerns in a blog post titled “Why increasing the gas limit is difficult.” The primary issue is the growth in the blockchain’s state size, which includes account balances and smart contract data. Currently, the state requires about 267 gigabytes (GB), and increasing the gas limit would accelerate its growth. While storage costs are not a major issue, the speed of accessing and modifying this data could slow down, and there are no immediate solutions to this problem.
The full history of the Ethereum blockchain is approximately 900GB, as per Blockchair. Wijden points out that higher gas limits could also lead to longer synchronization times and complicate the development of diverse clients. Gnosis co-founder Martin Köppelmann also expressed concerns about increased bandwidth requirements with a higher gas limit.
Ethereum team lead Péter Szilágyi shared similar worries, noting the potential for faster state growth, slower sync times, and increased risk of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.
The gas limit is crucial in Ethereum, as it caps the amount of computational work and gas used for executing transactions or smart contracts in each block. This cap ensures blocks are not excessively large, which could negatively impact network performance and synchronization.
There are potential solutions being explored, such as EIP-4444, which addresses chain history expiration, and EIP-4844, introducing “blobs” for rollup data availability. These upgrades aim to manage long-term growth trends.
In response to Buterin’s Reddit post, software developer Micah Zoltu emphasized that the objective should be to enable real-world users to run Ethereum nodes on standard computers. However, as the state and full blockchain size continue to expand, achieving this goal becomes increasingly challenging. Zoltu argues that the focus should be on making node operation feasible for a specific demographic rather than on specific hardware capabilities.
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