Author: Evan Van Ness Source: X, @evan_van_ness Translation: Shan Oppa, Golden Finance

Sorry to be cliche, but let's start with the most basic principles: What exactly do we want to achieve? I can think of a few possible reasons, but none of them really convince me:

Lower gas prices

Counter the ridiculous statement that "Ethereum has stopped L1 layer innovation"

"We should increase the Gas limit because it has not been adjusted for a long time. , the price is cheaper than the last adjustment”

Bring the app back to L1

Gas prices are already relatively low. The average transaction fee over the past month was 16 gwei. That average cost is totally reasonable to me.

"Ethereum stopped L1 innovation" is basically just a marketing issue, partly because some platforms choose to give their malicious critics a voice. But the problem is, when the criticism is this ridiculous, the substance doesn’t really matter.

Again, the gas price is already low enough, and increasing the gas limit does not equal innovation.

As for point 3, I actually think it’s a pretty reasonable point. If we as a community decide to gradually increase the gas cap as disk space and I/O performance improves, this can be seen as a credible commitment. But if this is just used as a separate reason, I think it is still relatively weak.

Some people really want to bring the application back to L1, but there is an "induced demand" problem here. If you increase the gas limit significantly, you can really bring many applications back and everything will look great. But before long, demand again exceeds supply, and transaction costs regularly return to 120 gwei.

"But wait, Evan, we are tech nerds, we only care about how much the network can handle!"

State size is not a big issue. Currently around 300GB (hat tip to @notnotstorm and @gakonst), which isn’t terribly large. The historical data issue is more difficult, but we plan to resolve it within six months.

Stateful I/O and bandwidth issues are more prominent.

Recently, we increased the chunk size when adding blobs. To be honest, for a while after the Pectra upgrade, I had to shut down the non-staking nodes at home when I needed to watch videos smoothly (such as a football match).

The client has made a lot of progress in bandwidth optimization in the past six months, maybe I'm just having a router issue. But we also plan to increase the chunk size again as we add more blobs. We should not increase bandwidth requirements excessively.

Disk I/O may be a bigger problem than bandwidth. Frankly, I think this is one of the less researched areas in Ethereum. For now, we're pretty safe on the margin, but in the long term, I'm not sure what the impact of some of the variables will be. And, I'm not an expert on this.

"Enough rambling, Evan, can we increase the gas limit?"

I think the Gas limit can be raised slightly, and that's absolutely fine. I intend to propose a small increase, say to 33M, when I see fit. If it works well, we can evaluate it and improve it further. Of course, there is a significant coordination cost, but this cost is actually beneficial: if we don't exercise our coordination skills, we will eventually just let this ability deteriorate.

But I don't think we should increase the gas limit to 60M in the near future, even if there is demand. I don’t think we have a strong argument for this yet, and Ethereum is past the “give it a go” phase.

I respect the views of those who hold different opinions, but we do not have the same burden of proof in this matter.

Wait, you're saying we could raise the gas limit, but you don't want to?

I'm glad you read this.

Yes, I don't think there is any good reason to increase the gas limit at this time. The gas fee is already very low and neither will the application. Returning to L1 should not be attempted.

Indeed, Gas prices will have a brief peak period, and then experience a long period of low prices. (Refer to the screenshot below.)

The bigger problem is these peak periods

This phenomenon is very common in commodity markets (incidentally, cryptocurrency price movements are often similar to commodities). You will see long periods of downturns, interspersed with short and sharp price fluctuations. Fluctuation.

I currently don't have an easy way to solve this problem (like increasing the max to 60M, but keeping the target at 15M?). However, the solution to this problem may require a similar idea

An unexpected phenomenon

If you don’t follow the Ethereum block space as closely as I do, you may not know that during 2022-2023, a HEX fork project called XEN kept the gas price artificially high. This is actually Gas for ETH The price created a bottom and kept Ethereum in negative issuance during the bear market (until Pectra introduced blobs)

I generally don't think it should be used. The people at Blockspace make the moral judgment. If you pay the fee, then usage is justified

But again: 7 days a week. There will always be periods of peak demand, and there will also be times when prices plummet. Encourage things like this. What’s the point of having low-priority, low-value, non-urgent transactions like XEN inflate our state size?

Overall, I think dimensionalityKeeping state size and I/O controllable preserves more flexibility until a SNARK or other "silver bullet" solution is found. As I've mentioned many times recently, Ethereum's goal is to become the currency and global settlement layer of the Internet. This means we don't take risks, so we always try to keep our options open.

Even if we implement stateless verification in the future, some high-performance servers will still be needed to complete block construction. Increased demand for RAM will raise barriers to entry. One of the great advantages of Ethereum is that even without a lot of capital, you can participate in the development of the ecosystem through technical contributions.

Again, I want to be as flexible as possible. I don't think the trade-off is worth it.

Okay, that's it. Some friends asked me to explain why I am against raising the gas cap, so I wrote this article. This is something I wrote off the cuff, with very little editing. Any revisions or different views are welcome.

Summary

We should increase the Gas upper limit at the appropriate time, but the current Gas price has Quite low and the median transaction fees are reasonable. Retain flexibility and wait until the right time to increase the gas limit.