Ethereum developers opposing Vitalik’s gas limit increase suggestion are concerned about the increasing size of the blockchain state.

Ethereum developers, node operators and users have yet to agree on Vitalik Buterin’s recent suggestion to increase the gas limit on Ethereum.

On Jan. 11, Buterin advocated for a “modest” 33% gas limit increase to potentially improve network throughput.

Increasing the gas limit to the proposed 40 million from the current 30 million would allow more transactions for each block, theoretically increasing the overall throughput and capacity of the network, he argued.

However, there are some drawbacks, according to Ethereum developer Marius van der Wijden, who aired his concerns in a Jan. 11 blog post titled “Why increasing the gas limit is difficult.”

The primary concern would be the increase in the size of the blockchain state, which contains account balances and smart contract data.

The total space needed right now is roughly 267GB only for the state, he said, adding “If we increase the gas limit, this size will grow even quicker.”

The Ethereum blockchain full history data size is currently around 900GB, according to Blockchair.

Wijden argued that storage is cheap, so size is not the issue and everyone will be able to store that amount of data, “however accessing and modifying it will become slower and slower,” before adding there are “no concrete solutions yet for state growth.”

Source - Coin Telegraph