Users, node administrators, and Ethereum developers have yet to agree regarding Vitalik Buterin’s recent proposal to increase Ethereum’s gas limit as they are concerned about the increasing size of the blockchain state.
Vitalik Buterin proposed on January 11 a “moderate” 33 percent increase in the gas limit to boost network throughput potentially.
He argued that increasing the gas limit from the current 30 million to the proposed 40 million would theoretically permit more transactions per block, thereby increasing the network’s throughput and capacity.
However, Marius van der Wijden, an Ethereum developer, said there are disadvantages. They expressed their apprehensions in a blog post dated January 11 titled “Why increasing the gas limit is difficult.”
The principal issue would be the escalation in the blockchain state’s magnitude, encompassing information such as account balances and smart contract data.
The state requires approximately 267 gigabytes (GB) of space exclusively. He stated, “This size will increase even more rapidly if we raise the gas limit.”
Approximately 900GB of complete history data is presently on the Ethereum blockchain, said Blockchair.
Before adding that “there are no concrete solutions yet for state growth,” Wijden argued that since storage is inexpensive, size is not an issue, and everyone will be capable of storing that volume of data. “However, accessing and modifying it will become progressively more arduous.”
Moreover, he continued to increase limits, lengthen synchronization periods, and complicate acquiring a diverse clientele.
Martin Koppelmann, co-founder of Gnosis, also expressed concern, stating that increasing the gas limit would result in a corresponding bandwidth expansion.
Peter Szilágyi, the leader of the Ethereum team, also expressed apprehensions regarding the escalation of gas limits.
“Increasing it definitely has a downside. State will grow faster, sync time will get slower quicker, DoS potential will grow.”
The gas limit specifies the maximum quantity of gas and labor utilized in each block to execute Ethereum transactions or smart contracts. Its configuration prevents blocks from becoming excessively enormous, which could negatively affect network performance and synchronization.
Upgrades such as EIP-4444, which addresses the expiration of chain history, and EIP-4844, which enables the availability of rollup data via “blobs,” are potential solutions that could aid in restraining long-term growth trends.
Micah Zoltu, a software developer, responded to Vitalik’s Reddit post by stating that the objective should be to enable ordinary users to operate Ethereum nodes on their computers. This, however, will become an increasingly difficult task as the state and total blockchain dimensions expand.
“Promoting the ability to operate an Ethereum node on a $X machine should not be our objective.” “Demographic X ought to be capable of operating an Ethereum node,” he stated.
