Ethereum developers have voiced their apprehensions regarding a recent proposition made by Vitalik Buterin, one of the network’s co-founders, to raise the gas limit within the blockchain.
Opposition to Vitalik Buterin’s Proposal
In a blog post dated January 11th, Ethereum developer Marius van der Wijden addressed the challenges associated with increasing the gas fee. He emphasized the size of the blockchain state and the subsequent repercussions as a central concern.
According to him, raising the gas limit at this juncture carries risks related to the blockchain’s state size, the rate of missed blocks, synchronization durations, historical data size, and client diversity. He also offered potential solutions to address these flagged issues if proceeding with a gas limit increase is deemed necessary.
The current size required for the blockchain state, which houses contract data, stands at 267 gigabytes. Simultaneously, the cumulative blockchain history spans approximately 900 gigabytes. Any increase in gas sizes could lead to further growth in these figures.
On October 11, 2023, the total state storage occupied 87 GB, whereas it was under 80 GB on June 6, 2023. This indicates an expansion of nearly 2 GB per month. To provide context, this space is projected to reach 111 GB in the next twelve months and 207 GB within the next five years, making it challenging to access and modify such a substantial volume of data.
Furthermore, Marius highlighted that this data size is only the snapshot, representing the plain state. Geth, the Ethereum client, also needs to store this state in an alternative format, the trie nodes, which demands approximately 180 GB at block 18418786 for state root verification.
History and sync dilemma
The increasing history size poses yet another challenge, especially given that transaction counts have doubled over the past three years, and the deployment of layer 2 networks has elevated the significance of historical data.
The blog post mentions that “EIP-4444” could potentially resolve the history growth issue, as it eliminates the necessity for full nodes to retain the entire history. However, implementing EIP-4444 requires the establishment of a robust network for retrieving historical data before permitting full nodes to cease serving it.
Raising the gas limit introduces difficulties in developing new clients for the Ethereum mainnet, particularly since Geth has already accrued a decade of experience, leaving newcomers with the option of learning from their predecessors.
Additionally, increasing the gas limit leads to slower full synchronization processes because it requires downloading more data, which impacts the speed of operations such as snap healing, historical data retrieval, and catching up.
Another Ethereum developer, Peter Szilagyi, expressed concerns on social media, suggesting that the state size would grow faster, potentially leading to Denial of Service (DoS) issues, while synchronization processes would become slower. He stressed the importance of having monitoring and metrics in place to assess the effects of changes before implementing them, to avoid making hasty decisions without a clear understanding of their impact.
