By Solomon Odunayo
Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum (ETH), has deeply explained the limit of blockchain scalability or why someone cannot just decide to increase the block size 10x.
This is a response to Elon Musk’s wish of speeding up the block time of Dogecoin (DOGE) by 10x, increasing its block size by 10x, and dropping its fees by 100x.
Read Also: Vitalik Buterin Shares His Thought on Ethereum’s Future as an Ultra Sound Money
On 16th May Elon Musk tweeted, “Ideally, Doge speeds up block time 10X, increases block size 10X & drops fee 100X. Then it wins hands down.”
Ideally, Doge speeds up block time 10X, increases block size 10X & drops fee 100X. Then it wins hands down.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 16, 2021
Buterin stated that there are factors to consider before deciding to act as Elon Musk wishes because there are limits to blockchain scalability to avoid leading to extreme centralization and compromising the fundamental properties of blockchain technology.
However, he said in many cases there are solutions, but even with the solutions there limits.
According to Buterin, there are three key limitations to a full node’s ability to process a large number of transactions:
- Computing power: what % of the CPU can we safely demand to run a node?
- Bandwidth: given the realities of current internet connections, how many bytes can a block contain?
- Storage: how many gigabytes on disk can we require users to store? Also, how quickly must it be readable? (ie. is HDD okay or do we need SSD).
Possible Ways to Try to Scale a Blockchain
According to Vitalik Buterin, there are two ways to try to scale a blockchain: fundamental technical improvements, and simply increasing the parameters.
He stated that increasing parameters is fundamentally flawed since computers that run blockchain nodes cannot spend 100% of CPU to validate the chain.
He said “they need a large safety margin to resist unexpected DoS attacks, they need spare capacity for tasks like processing transactions in the mempool, and you don’t want running a node on a computer to make that computer unusable for any other applications at the same time.”
“For a blockchain to be decentralized, it’s crucially important for regular users to be able to run a node, and to have a culture where running nodes is a common activity,” Vitalik Buterin added.
Explaining further, he said the major challenge of the Ethereum blockchain is storage size and statelessness, which state expiry can simply fix.
In conclusion, he said the scaling increase suggested by Elon Musk can be achieved, but it’s going to take work to do this without sacrificing the decentralization that makes blockchains so valuable.
Elon Musk Responds to Vitalik Buterin’s Opinion
In Response to Buterin’s opinion about the importance of decentralization and challenges of scaling a blockchain, the billionaire tech expert stated that “He fears the Doge,” captioning the image of a Shiba Inu dog trying to bite a dollar bill underwater, with a description that says, “You’ll never use the dollar again.”
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