In recent days, Ethereum (ETH) miners have begun to increase the Ethereum Block Gas Limit gas limit, which can be used to improve the capacity of the network transaction. This decision was taken as a result of the congestion recorded in recent weeks in the blockchain of the Ethereum.
Understanding the "gas"
"Gas" is a measure of computational effort. For each operation, a fixed amount of gas is allocated (eg adding two numbers costs 3 gas, calculating a hash costs 30 gas, sending one transaction costs 21,000 gas). Since computing is expensive (it is important that it be done for each complete node of the network), excessive gas consumption is usually discouraged. Therefore, each gas unit must be paid by the sender of the transaction that triggered the computation of computational steps in a transaction or message to trigger the execution of a smart contract. That is, a higher gas limit implies that there may be more transactions.
According to the Etherchain data we see that today we have an average gas limit higher than 6.7 million gas, an increase of more than 30% in the gas limit compared to previous weeks.
Evolution of block gas limit
Below we see the amounts spent on gas daily. According to Etherscan these expenses come on a ramp up almost daily. It had a historic peak in the middle of the last day of June 22.
It is important to note that the increase in the gas limit occurs when the Ethereum network registers an increase in the number of registered transactions, we also observed in Etherscan, that on June 26 we had the historical record of transactions where more than 316 thousand transactions were registered.
On the other hand, an important part of the user community has seen, both from the overexposure of ICOs and the growing interest of banks and financial organizations in the block of Ethereum, to congest the network. As a result of this congestion we have the increase of the number of transactions, with that the time of inclusion in a block have increased. But increasing the gas boundary should result in greater execution power of an entire node, hence more transactions in the block checked out. Remember that in terms of number of nodes, the Ethereum network is triple the number of nodes in the Bitcoin network.
Conclusion
Here opens a discussion in the community where many have stated for some time that the gas limit should increase, including the "gas cost" itself, which is the amount of gas needed to conduct a transaction. And others who have suggested that we should stimulate a reduction in gas prices saying that this would make the blockchain more decentralized and for such a reduction the miners should reduce their prices based on the argument that in theory the rates / prices of mining do not depend How many people use the network.
I do not know what the community will bring in the future, but following what we see in the charts above the gas limit had to be repositioned because of the increasing volume of transactions and the consolidation of the crypto-coins in the market.
Very interesting
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