Ethereum’s Gas Limit Increase Proposal Sparks Debate

Despite Vitalik Buterin’s recent proposal to raise the gas cap on Ethereum, Ethereum developers, node operators, and users have not yet reached a consensus on the matter.

Buterin promoted a “modest” 33% increase in the gas cap on January 11thto perhaps enhance the throughput of the network.

In his argument, he suggested that increasing the gas limit from the existing 30 million to the proposed 40 million would make it possible for more transactions to take place within each block, which would theoretically increase the total throughput and capacity of the network.

Nevertheless, there are a few drawbacks, as stated by Marius van der Wijden, an Ethereum engineer. HMarius van der Wijden, an Ethereum engineer, expressed his concerns in a blog post published on January 11 titled “Why increasing the gas limit is difficult.” 

Growth in the size of the blockchain state, which includes information on account balances and smart contract data, would be the key cause for concern.

He stated that the total amount of space that is required at the moment is approximately 267 gigabytes (GB) for the state alone, and he added, “If we increase the gas limit, this size will grow even faster.”

Blockchair reported that the Ethereum blockchain’s whole history data size is approximately 900 gigabytes at the moment. ijden noted that storage is inexpensive, which means that size is not an issue and that everyone will be able to store that amount of data.

However, he added that “accessing and modifying it will become slower and slower” and that there are “no concrete solutions yet for state growth.”

Additionally, he stated that larger restrictions increase the amount of time required for synchronization and make it more difficult to establish a diversified clientele.

TMartin Koppelmann, the co-founder of Gnosis, also claimed that raising the gas limit would increase bandwidth. Péter Szilágyi, the leader of the Ethereum team, was another individual who voiced worries about the expansion of gas limits.

“Increasing it definitely has a downside. State will grow faster, sync time will get slower quicker, DoS potential will grow.”

TThe gas limit in each block determines the maximum amount of effort and gas that can be expended to carry out various Ethereum transactions or smart contracts.

To prevent blocks from becoming excessively large, which would negatively impact network performance and synchronization, the gas limit is implemented among the potential remedies are updates such as EIP-4444, which addresses chain history expiration, and EIP-4844, which addresses rollup data availability by utilizing “blobs.”

Both of these upgrades will assist in preventing long-term growth patterns. Micah Zoltu, a software developer, responded to Vitalik’s post on Reddit by stating that the objective should be to make it possible for real-world consumers to run Ethereum nodes on their regular computers.

On the other hand, this will become an even more difficult task as the size of the state and the complete blockchain increase over time.

“Our objective should not be to guarantee that you can operate an Ethereum node on a system that costs $X. “You should be able to run an Ethereum node if you are a member of demographic X,” he stated.