【Selected ChainNews】"Increase in Gas Limit" Sparks Community Debate! Why are Developers Opposing?

Ethereum miners are voting to increase the Gas limit for each block by 25% to 12.5 million.

Written by: Zhang Gaijuan

On June 19th, Bitfly, the parent company of Ethereum mining pool Ethermine, tweeted, "Ethereum miners are voting to increase the Ethereum network limit from 10 million to 12.5 million. Theoretically, with the increase in Gas limit, Ethereum will be able to process about 44 transactions per second instead of 35. This is another significant milestone for the Ethereum community."

Gas limit is the maximum total amount of Gas allowed in a single block, which determines how many transactions can be packed into a single block. The last significant increase in Gas limit was in September 2019, when the limit was raised from 8 million to 10 million.

Checking Etherscan data, it was found that before June 18th, the average daily Gas limit for Ethereum was around 10 million, exceeding 10.74 million on June 19th, and rising to around 12 million on June 20th and 21st, reaching 11.8671 million and 11.9506 million respectively.

Ethereum daily average Gas limit, source: Etherscan

Currently, the Gas limit is around 11.6 million.

Latest Ethereum block mining data, source: Etherscan

This vote has ignited controversy within the Ethereum community regarding the Gas limit issue. According to Chainnews, the "Gas limit increase" has the following pros and cons:

Pros:

1. In theory, raising the Gas limit means being able to increase Ethereum's overall capacity while reducing costs.
2. Speed up network transaction processing. If the vote passes, Ethereum will be able to process approximately 44 transactions per second, instead of the current 35.
3. Can incentivize participants to contribute to the network's security and smooth operation.

Cons:

1. Increasing the Gas limit will require more resources for running and maintaining nodes to verify transactions on the network, leading to an increase in node operation costs.
2. May make the network more centralized.
3. Triggers uncle blocks issue. With the increase in Gas limit, miners need to spend more time processing each block. If multiple miners mine new blocks at the same block height, only one will become the block on the longest chain, while the others will become uncle blocks (eligible for partial rewards) when referenced by subsequent blocks.
4. Triggers DoS attacks issue.
5. Increasing block size does not scale the system.
6. Only miners can vote on this.
7. Larger blocks may pose a serious threat to single-shard networks like Ethereum 1.x.

Who benefits most from the Gas limit? Crypto News Flash analysis suggests that DeFi protocols and gaming Dapps on the Ethereum blockchain will benefit from the increase in Gas limit and the reduction in Gas fees. If the fees are too high, they may not be able to remain profitable. Additionally, the reduction in Gas fees could significantly increase the trading of tokens based on the Ethereum blockchain and have a positive impact on the performance of these tokens.

Some Ethereum miners and researchers support raising the Gas limit. Miner Han M stated, "Even if the proposal to raise the Gas limit reduces profits due to uncle blocks, I still support the proposal to raise the Gas limit." He believes that for 90% of people now, interacting with decentralized finance (DeFi) DApps (such as Synthetix) is too expensive. Although raising the Gas limit may damage some of our profits, it is a necessary sacrifice. Miners are concerned about the ecosystem and its availability. Cryptocurrency researcher XavierLava also believes that if this proposal passes, it can incentivize participants to contribute to the network's security and smooth operation.

However, raising the Gas limit will also lead to increased node operation costs, more centralization, uncle blocks, DoS attacks, and other issues. Therefore, many developers and mining pools have voiced their opposition.

In response to the vote, Ethereum core developer Péter Szilágyi stated that Ethereum miners do not care about the network's long-term health and DoS attack issues. With the increase in Gas limit, the blockchain's scale will become larger, making it more difficult and expensive to synchronize and run a complete node.

In response, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin mentioned that high transaction fees may diminish the usefulness of the blockchain. However, he revealed that SparkPool contacted him about this issue about six weeks ago, and at that time, he was against raising the Gas limit. But he added that the high fees in the past 6 weeks have put a lot of pressure on people, so it's understandable why they made this decision.

Vitalik Buterin further stated on Twitter: "(Although) I was against it 6 weeks ago, now that the Gas price has been so high, it's not good for users. The long-term solution is definitely to move all apps that can be moved to Rollup to Rollup first, and then wait for sharding, but in the short term, raising the Gas limit is the only way to scale, so the benefits may outweigh the drawbacks... I don’t know."

In response to Péter Szilágyi's "accusations" against Ethereum miners, miner Han M responded to Péter Szilágyi stating, "I admit that there are some communication issues within the entire mining community, but most miners are not as Péter Szilágyi imagines."

Researcher Alexey Akhunov provided an explanation from another perspective on the impact of raising the Gas limit. He stated, "Let's first see what will happen if the Gas limit is raised. If this is part of further improving network infrastructure, we must consider whether the downsides it triggers can be resolved. If they can, how should we resolve them? Otherwise, we should consider whether these downsides can be prevented. If the Gas limit exceeds a certain threshold, Ethereum may become a self-terminating system in the medium to long term, supported by very fragile infrastructure."

Focusing on blockchain scalability and information security, independent research institute Georgios Konstantopoulos expressed opposition to further increasing block size. He reiterated that increasing block size does not scale the system.

Ethereum mining pool Flexpool also opposes this. They stated that only miners can vote on this. It seems that only SparkPool and Ethermine participated in the vote. Miners can slightly increase the Gas limit with each new block mined. If the majority of miners want to increase the Gas limit, they will gradually increase it. A higher Gas limit will make the Ethereum network more centralized and increase node operation costs. This is why it is crucial to prevent such events from happening.

Flexpool also pointed out that larger blocks may pose a serious threat to single-shard networks like Ethereum 1.x. While Multi-Shared Eth2 is a huge milestone, a higher Gas limit is not.

In fact, on June 4th, 1inch.exchange conducted a Twitter poll on whether Ethereum miners should raise the Gas limit. The options were No, 25 million, 50 million, and 100 million. In response, Vitalik Buterin commented that 25 million is unrealistic and suggested setting the range between 12 million and 15 million. Vitalik Buterin mentioned that many client developers even worry about risks between 12 million and 15 million.

He then suggested making some changes to calculate Gas prices, including storage operations and basic transaction costs, to expand capacity by about 20%.

1inch's CTO Anton Bukov told Cointelegraph that raising the Gas limit could overload nodes running the network, prompting weaker nodes to leave the Ethereum network, resulting in lower network decentralization. This is why the Gas limit is being cautiously increased.

Indeed, over the past few months, Ethereum transaction fees and Gas usage have significantly increased.

BitInfoCharts data shows that since April this year, transaction fees on the Ethereum network have seen a significant increase. As of now, the average daily transaction fee on the Ethereum network is $0.465, more than 4 times higher than on April 1 ($0.0886). Starting in May, Ethereum's average transaction fees have ranged between $0.4 and $0.7.

Ethereum network transaction fees, source: BitInfoCharts

In comparison, Bitcoin's average daily transaction fee has returned to pre-third halving levels in May, below $1, reducing more than 86% from $6.647 on May 20.

Bitcoin network transaction fees, source: BitInfoCharts

According to Glassnode data, with the booming DeFi activities and increased market focus on Ethereum 2.0, Ethereum's daily Gas usage (7-day moving average) has surged by 62% this year, breaking 600 billion last month, nearing its all-time high, reaching 604.53 billion as of yesterday.

Ethereum daily Gas usage (7-day moving average), source: Glassnode

If the vote passes, the issue of soaring Ethereum transaction fees will be partially alleviated. However, the resulting increase in node operation costs, more centralization, DoS attacks, and other issues are also worth considering.

This article is authorized for reposting by Chainnews, article source: ChainNews (ID: chainnewscom)