Miners and some in the Ethereum community are considering increasing the gas block limit, achieving certain advantages and disadvantages for the network. They are currently voting to extend the block gas limit from 10.000.000 to 12.500.000 gas. This according to a recent tweet from Bitfly, the parent company of the Ethermine group.
Gas is a unit that measures the amount of computational effort required to send a transaction or perform other actions on the chain of blocks Ethereum. It is called in Gwei, or extremely small fractions of ETH. The block gas limit, in turn, is the gas threshold that can be spent on transactions presented within a block.
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The Ethereum community is divided
If the vote goes through, it would theoretically increase the overall capacity of the network and reduce fees. Specifically, according to Bitfly’s calculations, the Ethereum blockchain would start processing around 44 transactions per second. While it currently handles 35 transactions per second on average. The firm referred to this speed increase as a “great milestone for the community«.
However, increasing the gas limit also has some potential drawbacks. As the threshold gets larger, it takes miners longer to process each block. This results in the so-called “uncle blocks” problem. It occurs when two different miners generate a block at the same time. And only one of these blocks joins the blockchain, essentially resulting in extra work for miners.
Low-gas but resource-intensive operations can be used to attack nodes… If transaction processing starts to take 10-15 seconds, the nodes will completely stagnate.
Anton Bukov, CTO of 1Inch
Increases in the gas limit could also result in weaker nodes leaving the network, potentially making it less decentralized. “This is why the limit is raised so conservatively, and even then, it is usually done after achieving some optimization results in client implementations,” Bukov said at the time.
The recent initiative has met with strong opposition from some members of the community. Core Ethereum developer Péter Szilágyi, summarized Bitfly's tweet reads as follows: «Ethereum miners don't care about long-term network health or DoS attacks«.
