Consensus is yet to be reached among Ethereum developers, node operators, and users regarding Vitalik Buterin's recent proposal to increase Ethereum's gas limit. On January 11, Buterin suggested a "modest" 33% increase in gas limits, raising it from the current 30 million to 40 million, with the aim of potentially enhancing network throughput by accommodating more transactions per block. However, Ethereum developer Marius van der Wijden expressed concerns about this proposal, particularly related to the increase in the blockchain state's size, which includes account balances and smart contract data.
Wijden emphasized the potential drawbacks, pointing out that the current space needed for the state alone is around 267 GB, and increasing the gas limit would accelerate this growth. Although storage costs are relatively low, he noted that accessing and modifying data would become progressively slower, and as of now, no concrete solution has been identified to address this challenge. The co-founder of Gnosis, Martin Köppelmann, echoed these concerns, emphasizing that an increase in the gas limit would lead to a corresponding increase in bandwidth, potentially causing issues.
Péter Szilágyi, Ethereum team lead, also expressed reservations about raising the gas limits, highlighting downsides such as faster state growth, slower synchronization times, and increased potential for Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. The gas limit sets the maximum amount of work and gas spent on executing an Ethereum transaction or smart contract in each block. It's designed to prevent blocks from becoming overly large, which could negatively impact network performance and synchronization. Possible solutions being considered include upgrades like EIP-4444, addressing chain history expiration concerns, and EIP-4844, which utilizes "blobs" to aggregate data availability and help mitigate long-term growth trends. Some developers argue that the ultimate goal should be enabling real-world users to run Ethereum nodes on everyday machines, despite the challenges posed by the growing state and overall blockchain size.
