Golden Observation | Should the Ethereum gas limit be increased?

A tweet from Bitfly, the parent company of ethereum mining pool Ethermine, stirred up controversy over the weekend after the company revealed that miners were voting to increase the gas limit from 10 million gwei per block to 12.5 million gwei.

The Ethereum community was divided on the matter, with most taking to Twitter.

Ethereum miners said that, in theory, increasing the gas limit would mean increasing the overall production capacity of Ethereum while reducing fees. Currently, Ethereum’s per-transaction fees hover between $0.40 and $0.60, while the likes of BCH (Bitcoin Cash) or ADA (Cardano) charge less than $0.20, or even $0.10.

Every Ethereum transaction requires a certain amount of GAS to ensure a successful transaction or execute a smart contract on the network. At any given time, network activity determines the exact gas prices, although they do not vary significantly.

Golden Noon News | A list of important developments at noon on August 8: 7:00-12:00 Keywords: Sphere 3D, Fidelity, South Korea, Ukraine

1. Sphere 3D, a Nasdaq-listed company, obtained exclusive rights to Hertford Advisors’ bitcoin mining assets;

2. President of Fidelity Digital Assets: Currently in contact with regulators, aiming to bring encrypted assets into the mainstream;

3. Ethereum core developer: EIP-1559 reduces the annual inflation rate of ETH from 4.2% to 2.6%;

4. Small and medium-sized crypto exchanges have ceased operations due to the approaching special law in South Korea;

5. Standard Chartered Bank plans to launch a new crypto brokerage service in Ireland;

6. Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine: The new bill may soon make "the use of cryptocurrency payments legal";

7. ShibaSwap implements a destruction program to reduce the supply of SHIB and LEASH;

8. White House economic reporter: PoS is not exempted because it is newer than PoW and can be iterated in a way to evade supervision. [2021/8/8 1:41:47]

However, the usage rate of Ethereum's GAS has been close to the highest point in history recently. Most likely due to the increase in DeFi activity and the wider institutional interest in ETH2.0.

Maggie, Vice President of Golden Computing Cloud Operations: Distributed storage effectively solves the pain points of centralized storage: the theme sharing of the golden micro-interview "Will the market's high expectations for Filecoin become a kind of harm" held on July 21 Among them, in response to the question of "centralized storage technology has been very perfect, why do people give up efficient and high-performance centralized storage and choose IPFS as a brand-new application scenario?" Maggie, vice president of operation of Golden Computing Cloud, said that With the development, the amount of global data is increasing day by day, people store more and more files, photos, and videos, and the current centralized storage solutions are beginning to show limitations.

The main performance is that centralized storage is expensive and more vulnerable to attacks. Any failure of the server may lead to data loss. In addition, the bandwidth capacity of the server is limited, and collective access will cause network congestion.

Distributed storage effectively solves the pain points of centralized storage. In the process of use, there is no need to verify the identity of the sender, but only the hash of the content. This can make the web page faster, safer and more durable.

However, it will take a long time to replace centralized storage, which requires the continuous development of IPFS, hoping that one day it can replace centralized storage. [2020/7/22]

Golden Finance Live Report Jeffrey Wernick: Blockchain should be committed to building a transparent, fair, and collaborative platform: Golden Finance Live Report, Jeffrey Wernick, Ph.D. in Economics and Finance from the University of Chicago, early Bitcoin participant, and independent investor Jeffrey Wernick Speech at the opening ceremony of the chain conference three o'clock summit. Jeffrey Wernick pointed out that 1% of the people in the world own 50% of the wealth. We are producing data every day, so we should have the right to know and the right to gain value from these data. We should build a fair world, and this is precisely The application potential of blockchain development, regardless of race, nationality, or religion, we all need to cooperate with each other to truly solve problems. At present, VC and large investment institutions are not transparent enough. We need to build a more transparent community, make everyone more active, strive to build a better and more credible protocol and platform, and do more things that let everyone recognize its value. [2018/4/24]

If the miners vote in a majority, raising the gas cap will allow Ethereum to process more than 44 transactions per second, up from 35 currently. Bitfly sees this as a "huge milestone" for the community, if implemented.

But raising the upper limit will bring disadvantages. First, miners will need more time to process each block, which can lead to the infamous "uncle block" problem. The latter happens when two miners process a block at the same time, causing one block to be added to the network and the other to be discarded.

Orphan blocks that cannot become part of the main chain become uncle blocks if they are lucky enough to be accepted into the blockchain through the uncles field by later blocks. If an orphan block is not accepted by any block, the orphan block will still be discarded and will not enter the blockchain, that is to say, the orphan block will become an uncle block only after it is accepted.

Comments have pointed out that weaker nodes may leave the Ethereum network as a result. In turn, this could make Ethereum more centralized and vulnerable to control by large miners, at least until the end of the PoW consensus.

Ethereum core developer Péter Szilágyi objected, arguing that Ethereum miners simply don’t care about the long-term health of the network. As the cap increases, the size of the blockchain will become larger, making it more difficult and expensive to sync and run a full node, while also causing some DoS issues.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin responded that high transfer fees may make the blockchain useful Not as good as before, but he also revealed that Sparkpool contacted him about the matter more than a month ago, and he opposed the decision to increase the gas limit. But he added that the high fees over the past six weeks had put a real strain on it, so the decision was not to be blamed.

Georgios Konstantopoulos, an independent blockchain scalability researcher, said he was opposed to increasing the block size further, arguing that increasing the block size would not lead to scaling the wider ethereum network.

Meanwhile, members of the community have indicated that second-layer applications are already or are targeting thousands of transactions per second without requiring changes to the Ethereum protocol.

Just last week, Matter Labs, an Ethereum scaling project, announced that it had deployed its Layer 2 scaling tool zkSync on the Ethereum mainnet. The MatterLabs team said that zkSync will greatly solve the transaction cost on Ethereum, and the average transaction fee is designed to be kept at a low level of less than $0.01 for a long time, and the throughput of up to 2000TPS will be gradually realized. At present, zkSync has realized the "scalable payment function", and will follow-up to realize functions such as smart contract deployment, privacy and encryption anti-censorship, and finally realize scalable, privacy-protecting, fair and permissionless payment for billions of people encryption infrastructure.

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