Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, recently proposed increasing the Gas limit, which has raised concerns among Ethereum developers regarding challenges such as increased state size, longer synchronization time, increased DoS attack risks, and increased hardware requirements.
In a recent Reddit AMA event, Vitalik Buterin advocated for raising the current Gas limit of approximately 30 million to around 40 million as a reasonable choice to enhance network throughput.
Gas limit refers to the maximum amount of Gas that can be used for transactions or executing smart contracts on the Ethereum network. This limit ensures the appropriate size of blocks, avoiding impact on network performance and synchronization.
However, Vitalik Buterin’s proposal to address the growing transaction demands on Ethereum also comes with increased hardware burden and potential risks of network spam messages and attacks. In response to this, Ethereum developer Marius van der Wijden expressed his concerns.
Marius pointed out that the current Ethereum state, which includes account information and smart contract data, is approximately 267 GB. This means that running a full node currently requires this much storage space to store the latest data of all accounts and smart contracts. Increasing the Gas limit will result in faster growth of this number, further burdening the hardware of running full nodes.
As the Gas limit increases, each block can accommodate more transactions, which will make accessing and modifying these transaction data slower. Additionally, raising the Gas limit will also increase the time it takes to synchronize blocks and make it more difficult to develop and maintain diverse clients.
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, the co-founder of Gnosis, added that raising the Gas limit will also increase bandwidth requirements. Bandwidth refers to the ability to transmit data over a network, and in the context of blockchain, it specifically refers to the rate at which data is transmitted between blockchain nodes.
The concern expressed by the co-founder of Gnosis is that if the Gas limit is increased, higher bandwidth will be required to effectively process and transmit larger blocks, which will further increase the hardware requirements of nodes.
Micah Zoltu, a software developer, stated that the goal should be to enable real-world users to run Ethereum nodes on their everyday machines. However, as the state and the overall scale of the blockchain grow over time, this will be a greater challenge.
In response to the issue of the growing data on the Ethereum blockchain over time, Marius proposed some potential solutions, including:
– EIP-4444: This proposal will 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 interesting methods are being explored. If implemented, this will help control the size of the state, thereby improving data processing efficiency and reducing storage and computational resource requirements.