Altcoin News: Ethereum Block Size Secretly Increased by 25%

September 27, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

Ethereum (ETH) is arguably the largest and best-known smart contract platform. But the network also seems to slowly reach its limits.

A few days ago, the capacity of the Ethereum network has unexpectedly increased. This automatically results in an increase in the maximum number of transactions per second (TPS). But this unexpected development at Ethereum raises some critical questions and possible dangers.

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, said on Twitter last week that the block producers (miners) have started to raise the gas limit. The reason seems to be the overloaded Ethereum network, which has reached its limits. Gas is a clearing unit in the Ethereum network, which is used to package smart contracts in one block. This is the fee that has to be paid to a miner. This always takes place in Ethereum and is only charged internally in gas. The gas limit at Ethereum is comparable to the maximum number of transactions per block at Bitcoin.

For several days, the gas limit has risen to 10 million per block. This is an increase of about 25% compared to last week and automatically leads to more transactions per block and accordingly per second. However, this not only benefits such as a possible reduction in fees, but also disadvantages in the form of an increase in the blocks and, accordingly, the entire blockchain. This makes it increasingly expensive for nodes and more difficult to operate across the network.

Let’s now turn to the question of how this unexpected increase in the gas limit affects the Ethereum Network. The decentralization of the Ethereum network is more than questionable after such a “secret Hardfork”. A small number of developers and miners were sufficient to increase the gas limit and sustainably change the Ethereum Protocol. Either the other miners accept the change or they split in a hardfork. We already know that from the debate about the block size at Bitcoin Cash, which eventually led to a split to Bitcoin Satoshi Vision.

However, there is another problem. By increasing the gas limits and thus more transactions per block on the Ethereum Blockchain, the size of the Ethereum Blockchain increases faster. This puts more stress on nodes and miners who need to invest more money in hardware to continue participating in the network. Increased barriers to entry could further reduce decentralization and make the network even more centralized.

In addition, the increase in the gas limit seems to have brought only a brief moment. The Ethereum Blockchain seems to be full again. Thus, no real solution to the problem was found, but only minimally shifted to the future, with enormous cuts in decentralization.

Author: Marko Vidrih