Ethereum miners propose to increase the gas limit. Why is the community divided?

According to BlockBeats, on June 22, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin tweeted: “To be fair, many miners are still voting to lower the Gas limit, although we can’t be sure whether they are not changing the settings because of laziness or real opposition.”

However, on Twitter, Vitalik also expressed his dilemma. He said that he was against it six weeks ago, but "the gas price is still so high now, which is not good for users. The long-term solution is definitely to move all applications that can be moved to rollup to rollup first, and then wait for sharding, but in the short term, raising the gas limit is the only way to expand capacity, so the benefits may outweigh the disadvantages... I don't know."

It is understood that the origin of the incident was the controversy caused by a tweet released by Bitfly, the parent company of the Ethereum mining pool Ethermine, over the weekend. The company said that Ethereum miners were voting to increase the Gas limit of each block from 10 million to 12.5 million.

However, the Ethereum community is divided on whether to increase the upper limit of gas. Some miners believe that increasing the upper limit of Ethereum blocks will theoretically increase Ethereum's overall throughput while reducing fees. Currently, Ethereum's fees hover between $0.40 and $0.60 per transaction, which is higher than the per-transaction fees of networks such as BCH or ADA.

But increasing the gas limit also has disadvantages. For example, miners will spend more time processing each block (because a higher gas limit means that each block will hopefully contain more transactions), which may lead to the "uncle block" problem. In addition, some comments have also pointed out that weaker nodes may also leave the network, which in turn will make Ethereum more centralized and easier to be controlled by large miners, at least for now.

As a result, some community members opposed the proposal, including core Ethereum developer Peter Szilagyi. Peter retweeted Bitfly and commented: "Ethereum miners do not care about the long-term security of the network, nor do they care about DoS attacks."

For a long time, the Layer 2 solution has been the most widely recognized solution for this type of problem.

Further reading: Ethereum’s Layer 2 track

Reference article: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/UTZi5UcqgUf1FayWS2mXGw