Ethereum’s community is currently embroiled in a debate sparked by Vitalik Buterin’s recent proposal to increase the gas limit on the network.
Buterin’s suggestion, made on January 11th, called for a “modest” 33% boost in the gas limit, aiming to enhance network throughput.
The proposed gas limit increase from the current 30 million to 40 million would potentially allow more transactions per block, thereby increasing the network’s overall throughput and capacity.
However, Ethereum developer Marius van der Wijden raised some concerns about this move in a blog post titled “Why increasing the gas limit is difficult.”
One of the primary concerns is the expansion of the blockchain state, which encompasses account balances and smart contract data.
Currently, the state requires approximately 267 gigabytes (GB) of storage space, and increasing the gas limit would only exacerbate this issue.
While storage costs may be relatively low, accessing and modifying this expanding data would become progressively slower, with no clear solutions for managing state growth.
Furthermore, increasing the gas limit would also lead to longer synchronization times and complicate the development of diverse Ethereum clients, according to Wijden.
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Gnosis co-founder Martin Köppelmann echoed these concerns, highlighting the potential bandwidth increase associated with raising the gas limit.
Péter Szilágyi, Ethereum’s team lead, also acknowledged the downsides of increasing the gas limit, emphasizing the faster growth of the state, the quicker slowdown of synchronization, and the heightened potential for denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.
The gas limit represents the maximum amount of work and gas expended when executing Ethereum transactions or smart contracts in each block.
It serves to maintain block sizes within reasonable limits to preserve network performance and synchronization.
Potential solutions to these challenges include proposed upgrades such as EIP-4444, addressing chain history expiration, and EIP-4844, which introduces “blobs” to improve rollup data availability and mitigate long-term growth trends.
Software developer Micah Zoltu contributed to the discussion, emphasizing the importance of enabling real-world users to run Ethereum nodes on everyday machines.
However, achieving this goal becomes more challenging as the state and full blockchain size continue to expand, emphasizing the need for a holistic approach to Ethereum’s scalability and accessibility.
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