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Reasons to have higher L1 gas limits even in an L2-heavy Ethereum
One important near-term debate in the Ethereum roadmap is the question of how much to increase the L1 gas limit. Recently, the L1 gas limit was increased from 30 million to 36 million, increasing capacity by 20%. Many support following up with much larger increases in the near future. These increases are made safe by recent and upcoming improvements in technology: efficiency improvements to Ethereum clients, reduced need to store old history due to EIP-4444 (see roadmap), and later on stateless clients.
d/acc: one year later
About a year ago, I wrote an article on techno-optimism, describing my general enthusiasm for technology and the massive benefits that it can bring, as well as my caution around a few specific concerns, largely centered around superintelligent AI, and the risk that it may bring about either doom, or irreversible human disempowerment,
What I would love to see in a wallet
One critical layer of the Ethereum infrastructure stack, often underappreciated by core L1 researchers and developers, is the wallet. Wallets are the window between a user and the Ethereum world, and a user only benefits from any decentralization, censorship resistance, security, privacy, or other properties that Ethereum and its applications offer to the extent that the wallet itself also has these properties.
Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 2: The Surge
At the beginning, Ethereum had two scaling strategies in its roadmap. One (eg. see this early paper from 2015) was "sharding": instead of verifying and storing all of the transactions in the chain, each node would only need to verify and store a small fraction of the transactions.
Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 5: The Purge
One of Ethereum's challenges is that by default, any blockchain protocol's bloat and complexity grows over time. This happens in two places:
Historical data: any transaction made and any account created at any point in history needs to be stored by all clients forever, and downloaded by any new clients making a full sync to the network. This causes client load and sync time to keep increasing over time, even as the chain's capacity remains the same.Protocol features: it's much easier to add a new feature than to remove an old one, causing code complexity to increase over time.
Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 4: The Verge
One of the most powerful things about a blockchain is the fact that anyone can run a node on their computer and verify that the chain is correct. Even if 95% of the nodes running the chain consensus (PoW, PoS...) all immediately agreed to change the rules, and started producing blocks according to the new rules, everyone running a fully-verifying node would refuse to accept the chain. The stakers who are not part of such a cabal would automatically converge on, and continue building, a chain that continues to follow the old rules, and fully-verifying users would follow that chain.
Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 3: The Scourge
One of the biggest risks to the Ethereum L1 is proof-of-stake centralizing due to economic pressures. If there are economies-of-scale in participating in core proof of stake mechanisms, this would naturally lead to large stakers dominating, and small stakers dropping out to join large pools. This leads to higher risk of 51% attacks, transaction censorship, and other crises. In addition to the centralization risk, there are also risks of value extraction: a small group capturing value that would otherwise go to Ethereum's users.
Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 1: The Merge
Originally, "the Merge" referred to the most important event in the Ethereum protocol's history since its launch: the long-awaited and hard-earned transition from proof of work to proof of stake.
Layer 2s as cultural extensions of Ethereum
In my recent post on the differences between layer 1 and layer 2 scaling, I ended up roughly coming to the conclusion that the most important differences between the two approaches are not technical but organizational (using the word in a similar sense to the field of "industrial organization"): it's not about what can get built, but what will get built, because of how the lines between different parts of the ecosystem are drawn and how that affects people's incentives and ability to act. In particular, a layer-2-centric ecosystem is inherently much more pluralistic, and more naturally leads to a greater diversity of different approaches to scaling, virtual machine design, and other technological features.
How do layer 2s really differ from execution sharding?
One of the points that I made in my post two and half years ago on "the Endgame" is that the different future development paths for a blockchain, at least technologically, look surprisingly similar.
VitalikButerin
vitalik.eth
