Opinion: Why I am against raising Ethereum’s gas limit now?

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

Sorry to use clichés, but let’s start with the most basic principles: What exactly are we trying to achieve? I can think of a few possible reasons, but none of them really convince me: Lower gas prices Counter the ridiculous “Ethereum stopped innovating on L1” narrative “We should raise the gas limit because it’s been a while and it’s cheaper than the last time it was raised” Bring applications back to L1 Gas prices are relatively low already. The average transaction fee over the past month has been 16 gwei. Such an average fee makes perfect sense to me. “Ethereum stopped innovating on L1” is mostly just a marketing issue, partly because some platforms choose to give voice to those malicious critics. But the problem is that when the criticism is so ridiculous, the substance doesn't really matter.

Again, gas prices are already low enough that raising 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 limit as disk space and I/O performance improve, this can be seen as a credible commitment. But if used as a standalone reason, I think it's still relatively weak.

Some people really want to bring applications back to L1, but there is a problem of "induced demand" here. You raise the gas limit significantly, and it does bring back many applications, and everything looks great. But before long, demand exceeds supply again, and transaction costs return to 120 gwei on a regular basis.

“But wait, Evan, we’re geeks, we only care about how much the network can handle!”

Okay, but that’s not a simple question. “How much the network can handle” is very complex in the short and long term.

State size is not a big issue. It’s currently around 300GB (hat tip to @notnotstorm and @gakonst), which isn’t terribly large. The history issue is a bit more problematic, but we plan to have that resolved in six months.

State I/O and bandwidth are more of a problem.

We recently increased the block size when we added blobs. To be honest, there was a period of time after the Pectra upgrade when I had to shut down my non-staking node at home when I needed to stream videos (like football games) smoothly.

Clients have made a lot of progress in bandwidth optimization over the past six months, so maybe I'm just having router issues. But we also plan to increase the block size again as we add more blobs. We shouldn't increase bandwidth requirements too much.

Disk I/O is probably a bigger problem than bandwidth. Frankly, I think it's one of the less studied areas of Ethereum. Right now, we're safe on the margins, but I'm not sure what some of the variables will do in the long term. And I'm not an expert on this.

"Enough of that, Evan, can we raise the gas limit?"

I think a small increase in the gas limit is absolutely fine. I plan to propose a small increase when I think it's appropriate, maybe to 33M. If it works well, we can evaluate and increase it further. Of course, there will be significant coordination costs, but these costs are actually beneficial: if we don’t exercise coordination ability, we will eventually degrade it.

But I don’t think we should raise the gas limit to 60M anytime soon, even if there is demand. I don’t think we have a strong argument for doing so yet, and Ethereum is past the “give it a go” stage.

I respect the views of those who disagree, but we don’t have the same burden of proof on this matter.

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

I’m glad you read this far.

Yes, I don’t think there is any strong reason to raise the gas limit at this point. Gas fees are already low. A marginal increase in the gas limit will neither bring applications back to L1, nor should it be attempted.

It’s true that gas prices have short spikes followed by long periods of low prices. (See screenshot below.)

The bigger problem is that these spikes

are common in commodity markets (and, by the way, cryptocurrency prices often behave like commodities). You see long periods of downturns interspersed with short, sharp price swings.

I don't currently have an easy way to solve this problem (e.g., increase the maximum to 60M, but keep the target at 15M?). However, the direction of solving this problem may require similar ideas.

An unexpected phenomenon

If you don't follow the Ethereum blockspace as closely as I do, you may not know that in 2022-2023, a HEX fork project called XEN kept gas prices artificially high. This actually created a floor for ETH's gas prices and kept Ethereum in a negative issuance state during the bear market (until Pectra introduced blobs).

I generally don't think that people who use blockspace should be morally judged. If you pay the fee, then the use is reasonable.

But I repeat: there are always peaks in demand 7 days a week, and there are also times when prices plummet. What is the point of encouraging low-priority, low-value, non-urgent transactions like XEN to inflate our state size?

In general, I think keeping state size and I/O manageable allows more flexibility until SNARKs or other "silver bullet" solutions are found. As I have mentioned many times recently, Ethereum's goal is to be 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 achieve stateless verification in the future, we will still need some high-performance servers to complete block construction. The increase in RAM requirements will increase the barrier to entry. And 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 keep flexibility as much as possible. I don't think this trade-off is worth it.

Okay, that's it. Some friends asked me to explain why I'm against raising the gas limit, so I wrote this post. This is something I wrote off the cuff with little editing. Please feel free to suggest revisions or different perspectives.

Summary

We should raise the gas limit when appropriate, but the gas price is already quite low and the median transaction fee is reasonable. Keep the flexibility to raise the gas limit when the time is right.