Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, recently proposed increasing the Gas limit, which has raised concerns among Ethereum developers regarding challenges such as state size growth, longer synchronization times, increased DoS attack risks, and increased hardware requirements.
In a recent Reddit AMA event, Vitalik Buterin (also known as V God) advocated for increasing the current Gas limit of approximately 30 million to around 40 million as a reasonable choice to enhance network throughput. The Gas limit refers to the maximum amount of Gas that can be used per block for transactions or executing smart contracts on Ethereum. This limit ensures that block size remains appropriate, avoiding any impact on network performance and synchronization.
However, the proposal put forth by Vitalik Buterin to address the growing transaction demands on Ethereum comes with increased hardware burdens and potential risks of network spam messages and attacks. Marius van der Wijden, an Ethereum developer, expressed his concerns about this.
Marius pointed out that the current Ethereum state (which includes account information and smart contract data) is already approximately 267 GB in size. This means that operating a full node currently requires that much storage space to store all the latest data of accounts and smart contracts. Increasing the Gas limit would result in faster growth of this number, further burdening the hardware requirements for operating a full node.
As the Gas limit increases, allowing more transactions to be accommodated in each block, accessing and modifying these transaction data will become slower. Additionally, increasing the Gas limit will also increase the time it takes to synchronize blocks for nodes, as well as make the development and maintenance of diverse clients more challenging.
Péter Szilágyi, the leader of the Ethereum team, also expressed similar concerns, stating that “increasing the Gas limit will accelerate state growth, slow down synchronization speed, and increase DoS attack risks.”
Martin Köppelmann, co-founder of Gnosis, added that increasing the Gas limit will also increase bandwidth requirements. Bandwidth refers to the ability to transmit data over a network, particularly the rate at which data is transmitted between blockchain nodes.
The concern expressed by Martin Köppelmann is that if the Gas limit is increased, higher bandwidth will be needed to effectively process and transmit larger blocks, which will further increase the hardware requirements for nodes.
In response to this, software developer Micah Zoltu stated that the goal should be to enable real-world users to run Ethereum nodes on their everyday machines. However, as the state and overall blockchain scale grow over time, this will pose a greater challenge.
Regarding the issue of growing data on the Ethereum blockchain, Marius proposed some potential solutions, including:
– EIP-4444: This proposal aims to address the issue of historical data growth, allowing full nodes to not store all historical data.
– State Expiry: An effective solution for state expiry has not been found yet, but some interesting methods are being explored. If implemented, this would help control the size of the state, thereby improving data processing efficiency and reducing storage and computational resource requirements.
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