Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently shared a number of ways to cut down on Ethereum’s bloat in the leading smart contract platform’s “Purge” update roadmap.
Cutting down the requirement for each network node to have to permanently maintain all history along with unnecessary protocol details may help with addressing Ethereum’s (ETH) bloat, Vitalik Buterin recently explained.
Referred to as “The Purge,” the potential roadmap is notably Buterin’s fifth such update in an extensive series focusing on Ethereum’s foreseeable future.
It’s worthwhile to note that ever since Ethereum was introduced by the then 19-year-old Buterin back in 2015, there were hardly any other blockchain-based smart contract platforms attempting to offer the same set of features that Ethereum did at the time. In the past decade, Buterin has been very active when it comes to working on possible solutions to help scale the ETH network while optimizing performance and efficiency. While other prominent developers like Vlad Zamfir have had better ideas at times, there’s no denying Buterin’s contributions to the Ethereum and wider web3 and crypto ecosystem.
During the past few years, Vitalik Buterin has also become increasingly vocal about how the ETH roadmap should look, and has in detail shared a potentially viable / realistic roadmap addressing the L1 chain’s complexity as well as considerable “bloat.”
Buterin explained via social media that a decentralized crypto network protocol’s bloat mainly results form its growing number of features as well as the gradual accumulation of pertinent historical data.
Operating an Ethereum (ETH) blockchain network node presently requires around 1.1 terabytes worth of disk space just for the execution client, which connects to the ETH DLT network and maintains the database of its data along with many more gigs of storage for the consensus client (which runs Etheruem’s PoS consensus algorithm). Based on Buterin’s analysis, it is not completely clear as to whether these significant requirement are due to current hardware tech limitations or software challenges (presumably both).
Buterin further noted that significantly lowering the requirement for each node to permanently maintain all relevant history and unnecessary protocol features may help achieve this aim of reduced bloat, referred to as “The Purge,” while, at the same time, being able to maintain blockchain permanence.
Buterin said that by making node running more affordable, we can get to a network with 100,000 nodes, where each node “stores a random 10% of the history, then each piece of data would get replicated 10,000 times — exactly the same replication factor as a 10,000-node network where each node stores everything,”
Buterin went on to share how to expire Ethereum’s state, which essentially comprises of account balances, contract codes as well as contract.
Notably, the Purge is the latest update in a comprehensive series that Vitalik Buterin has shared pertaining Ethereum’s roadmap (which has been quite uncertain compared to other chains such as Bitcoin, which remains the larest and most dominant crypto network by a very significant margin).
Recently, Vitalik Buterin also discussed various approaches to address proof-of-stake centralization risks (referred to as ‘The Scourge” and “The Verge” which aims to explore lowering the overall computational requirements of operating an Ethereum blockchain network node).
Buterin explained that figuring out this path / roadmap for Ethereum, the world’s largest smart contract platform, in a more generalized way, and moving toward an eventual outcome that is “stable for the long term, is the ultimate challenge of Ethereum’s long term scalability, technical sustainability and even security.”