For several days now, the Ethereum community has been debating the possibility of increasing the Gas limit within the network blocks, as an action that can improve its scalability and improve the congestion problems that it has presented recently.
Although miners are requesting an increase in the Gas limit per block, several in the community believe that this action will bring negative consequences for users and the community in general.
In this regard, the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin He also spoke out stating that this increase could mean an improvement in the scalability of the network in the short term, but that in the long term it could have negative consequences for users.
The debate in which the Ethereum community finds itself proposes that the Gas limit, which currently stands at 10.000.000, be increased to 12.500.000, which represents an increase of 25% of the current limit.
For several developers and community members, an increase in the Gas limit would result in an increase in the network's capacity to process transactions much more quickly, while reducing the costs of current commission rates for send transactions within the network; but at the same time this increase can bring a negative consequence, and that is to allow attacks of DoS (denial of services) within Ethereum. Therefore, many consider that this increase will undoubtedly have repercussions within the cryptographic space of this network.
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Greater network usage demands a higher Gas limit on Ethereum
It is estimated that the increase in the use of the Ethereum network by users is what has led part of the community and miners to propose an increase in the Gas limit. In recent months, there has been greater activity within Ethereum, something that at the same time means that within Ethereum miners are already working with a Gas limit higher than the established one.
The figures can be seen in Etherscan, a block explorer for the Ethereum blockchain that shows that Gas prices on Ethereum have tripled recently.
Source: Etherscan
The graph shows the average Gas prices used daily within the Ethereum network in recent months.
But what is gas within Ethereum?
Gas within Ethereum is a concept very specific to this blockchain, and represents an abstract measure that indicates the work carried out within the network. We can say that Ethereum Gas shares a very similar meaning to the concept of block size of the Bitcoin network, which aims to guarantee the security of the system.
In the case of Ethereum Gas represents the maximum number of calculations that can be added within a block on the blockchain. Each operation carried out within this network will have a specific cost measured in Gas units.
This measure fulfills specific functions within the network. For example, Gas is the unit used to measure the cost of carrying out an operation or transaction within the network, so it can be taken as the price to pay for carrying out a transaction. Likewise, Gas contributes to the security and operation of the network by establishing a price for actions carried out within it, preventing users from executing spam attacks and DoS attacks.
Finally, the Gas represents the reward of the miners as part of carrying out the mining activity within the blockchain.
The main Ethereum mining pools vote for this increase
As mentioned at the beginning, several developers and members of the Ethereum community agree with the miners' request to increase the current Gas limit. Thus, the main Ethereum mining pool, spark pool It already has more than 1.900 votes in favor of this increase. Next is the pool Ethermine which has a total of 1.299 votes, although to date the other mining pools on the Ethereum network have not commented on the matter.
The voting list can be seen at Etherchain.
For its part, Ethermine also announced through its official Twitter account that the increase in the Gas limit on Ethereum will be a great milestone for the community, since the network would go from processing 35 transactions per second to processing about 44 transactions. improving its scalability.
Possible negative consequences of this increase
Likewise, several important figures within Ethereum assure that increasing Gas to this extent could be very negative for the network. In this sense, Péter Szilágyi, developer and leader of Ethereum expressed through his Twitter account that:
“The miners of #Ethereum “They don’t worry about the long-term health of the network or DoS attacks.”
Making a clear reference to the fact that miners only care about their own interests and not those of the community in general, Szilágyi considers that increasing gas to this extent will make the Ethereum blockchain become larger, and therefore, more complicated to maintain, especially in security aspects and attack prevention.
For his part, Vitalik Buterin's comments were in line with those made by Szilágyi, mentioning that although in the short term the increase in the gas limit may be beneficial, in the long term it will be risky and harmful to the network.
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