As Ethereum grows, so does its history – and the hard disk requirements for validators, whose wallets are hurting. During a Reddit AMA, Ethereum users talked about past chain data management and discussed ways to scale Ethereum L1. Meanwhile, founder Vitalik Buterin also added his take.
Time to rewrite history?
Buterin offered two possible solutions for dealing with historical Ethereum data. These included a one-time history expiry which would take place after the Merge, as well as a periodic history expiry with a shifting deadline, formally known as EIP-4444. He clarified that the two solutions could be put in place.
One user asked about proposer/builder separation (PBS). Buterin recently posted about this method which was meant to stop block proposers – or miners – from adding transactions to the block in a way that benefited them.
For his part, Buterin explained,
“Statelessness + PBS would allow independent validators to operate without any storage requirements. Only builders and light client servers would have storage requirements.”
Buterin warned that PBS has not yet been fully developed and tested. Even so, he spoke about the theft of maximal extractable value [MEV] and said,
“Personally, I think we’ll have to eventually have PBS or state expiration (or maybe both), and PBS looks more realistic because it’s urgent for other reasons (MEV). “
Meanwhile, Ethereum Improvement Proposal-4444 deals with historical data in Ethereum clients. The old blocks in the Ethereum chain would result in over 400 gigabytes of hard drive storage space. This means that validators have to buy even bigger disks. EIP-4444 suggested,
“Clients must stop serving historical headers, bodies, and receipts older than one year on the p2p layer. Clients may locally prune this historical data.”
An AMA user was not sure that the historical expiration would bring benefits to the end user. In response, Buterin said:
“Running a node becomes cheaper. Alternatively, it could be used to justify a moderate gas limit increase, which would lower tx fees.”
Wrap me up
Stacks have an important role to play in the Ethereum ecosystem as they are the layer two solution to increasing transactions on the second largest crypto by market cap. However, Reddit users wanted to know how rollups would access expired history and data.
Buterin assured users and said:
“It is very unrealistic that old data will disappear completely; there are far too many services that have an interest in ensuring its availability: block explorers, any major player in the rollup ecosystem, exchanges, etc. ”
