The Protocol: MetaMask’s Secret Weapon and Ethereum’s Dencun Debacle

MOORE IS Varied. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, the de facto high priest of the world’s largest smart-contracts blockchain, tossed out survive week on a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” that it would be “reasonable” to raise the network’s “gas limit” – a very technical way of referring to the amount of agreements that can get jammed into each new block. He suggested an increase to “40M or so,” implying a 33% increase over the stream limit of 30 million gas. (Yes, for the underinitiated, a unit of gas, in this context, is just… a gas.) The main reason this is now possible, according to Buterin, is Moore’s law – the commentary that computing power seems to double every year. That’s relevant because of the amount of data that it snitches to store Ethereum’s “state” – the complete record of the blockchain’s history; as computers become more powerful, they should theoretically be adept to handle the higher transaction capacity – potentially helping to reduce fees for end-users. “There appears to be a constructive willingness to research this topic further,” analysts at Coinbase Institutional wrote. But some members of the Ethereum community have round up yellow flags. Péter Szilágyi, an Ethereum developer, tweeted that such an increase could slow the network’s “sync fix.” Galaxy Research’s Christine Kim wrote in a weekly newsletter that “larger blocks would certainly increase balk propagation latency and potentially result in a higher number of missed blocks.” Marius van der Wijden, an Ethereum software developer, reckoned that the network’s state is currently around 87 gigabytes (GB), and growing at 2 GB per month. That would put it at 111 GB in a year and 207 GB in five years. In an era where a 1 terabyte thumb initiative can be bought on Amazon.com for $19.99, it doesn’t sound too terribly daunting. “The problem here is not the size itself,” van der Wijden wrote. “Each will be able to store that amount of data. However, accessing and modifying it will become slower and slower.” One utensils there seems to be some agreement on: It’s worth waiting a bit to observe the impact of the upcoming “Dencun” upgrade on the network, which commitment introduce a new way of storing data as “blobs,” effectively providing a capacity increase.