Vitalik Buterin says Ethereum community should push for gas limit to increase with Istanbul 🚨 This article is 5 years old...
Vitalik Buterin says Ethereum community should push for gas limit to increase with Istanbul
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Updated: Nov. 7, 2019 at 2:43 am UTC
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Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, has said that in order to raise the gas limit for Ethereum’s next fork, the community should start an online campaign. An active Twitter and Reddit campaign would convince large mining pools to push the gas limits up and solve the network’s congestion problem.
Ethereum’s congestion problem needs a quick solution
The world’s second-largest blockchain network, Ethereum, has been experiencing unprecedented congestion in the past couple of weeks, with reports showing that Ether’s network utilization has reached 90 percent.
Earlier this week, Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, warned that the increased utilization could result in larger transaction costs, which would, in turn, deter corporate and institutional users from using Ethereum.
In a lengthy Reddit thread discussing the effects Tether has on the Ethereum network, Buterin said that developers were actively working on layers 1 and 2 that would solve Ethereum’s high fee problems. But, until that happens, the only thing that would help reduce some of the congestion on the network would be to increase the gas limit, he said.
With a large part of the Ethereum community pushing for it, Buterin said the best way to do it would be to start an online campaign. Buterin wrote on Reddit:
“I’d recommend starting a Reddit/Twitter campaign to promote the cause of pushing the gas limits up. Historically the large mining pools have listened to community pressure,” Istanbul fork could allow more transactions with the same gas limit.”
With F2Pool and Sparkpool, which represent around 40 percent of all Ethereum miners, currently supporting the idea of increasing the gas limit, the support of just one other mining pool would be enough to go through with the increase. Buterin said that getting either Ethermine or Nanopool onboard with the idea would secure the majority.
However, he noted that the best strategy would be to wait and not rush into increasing the gas limit. Istanbul, an upcoming Ethereum fork, will bring several gas-related improvements, TrustNodes reported, adding that they alone would allow for more transactions to be fitted within the current gas limit.
Buterin further explained on Reddit:
“It’s not clear that exactly now is the best time; it could be better to do a bigger gas limit jump at the same time as the Istanbul fork when the opcodes that present the greatest risks will see their gas costs bumped up so higher gas limits become safer.”
The Istanbul update, which was scheduled to go live at the beginning of October, has been delayed for a month due to problems with the implementation of Parity, one of the most advanced Ethereum clients.
Ethereum Market Data
At the time of press 2:43 am UTC on Nov. 7, 2019, Ethereum is ranked #2 by market cap and the price is up 0.43% over the past 24 hours. Ethereum has a market capitalization of $18.47 billion with a 24-hour trading volume of $5.21 billion. Learn more about Ethereum ›
Crypto Market Summary
At the time of press 2:43 am UTC on Nov. 7, 2019, the total crypto market is valued at at $252.73 billion with a 24-hour volume of $41.29 billion. Bitcoin dominance is currently at 69.51%. Learn more about the crypto market ›
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