Ethereum developers are expressing reservations about Vitalik Buterin’s recent proposal to increase the gas limit on the blockchain. In a blog post on January 11, developer Marius van der Wijden outlined concerns, particularly emphasizing the challenges related to the size of the blockchain state.
Wijden highlighted potential risks associated with raising the gas limit, including concerns about state size, missed block rates, synchronization times, history size, and client diversity. He proposed solutions to address these flagged areas if the decision to increase the gas limit moves forward.
The blog post pointed out that the total size required for the blockchain state, which includes contract data, is currently 267 gigabytes. Additionally, the total blockchain history is approximately 900 gigabytes, potentially leading to further growth if gas sizes are increased.
Wijden provided historical data, noting that on October 11, 2023, the total state storage was 87 GB, and by June 6, 2023, it was less than 80 GB. This indicates a growth of almost 2 GB per month. The extrapolation suggests that the space needed will be 111 GB in the next twelve months and 207 GB in the next five years, making it challenging to access and modify such a large amount of data.
Addressing the history size challenge, Wijden mentioned the significance of EIP-4444, a proposal designed to solve the history growth problem by allowing full nodes to avoid storing all the history. However, he emphasized the need for a robust network before implementing EIP-4444.
The blog post highlighted that raising the gas limit would increase the difficulty in building new clients for the mainnet, with Geth already having a decade of experience. Furthermore, increasing the gas limit could slow down full sync due to the additional data downloads, affecting the speeds of snapshot healing, history, and catching up.
In response to these concerns, Ethereum developer Peter Szilagyi, on X (formerly Twitter), expressed apprehension about the accelerated growth of state size along with potential impacts on Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks and slower synchronization.
Szilagyi emphasized the importance of comprehensive monitoring and metrics before implementing changes, suggesting the need for tooling that can assess the effects of a change before its implementation to avoid unforeseen issues.