Vitalik Buterin Shares Plan to Reduce Ethereum’s Bloat and Complexity

• Vitalik Buterin has published another part of his recent blog series.
• The latest publication promoted “The Purge.”
• The Purge seeks to address Ethereum’s data bloat and complexity challenges.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has shared new thoughts about the blockchain network’s plan to reduce data bloat and complexity.

Buterin aired the ideas in an October 26 post, which covered the fifth part of his recent blog series on Ethereum’s possible futures. The latest publication, “The Purge,” focuses on reducing client storage requirements and eliminating outdated features to enhance Ethereum’s efficiency while maintaining its permanence.

The Purge

According to Vitalik Buterin’s post , the Ethereum blockchain’s bloat and complexity have grown over time due to additional protocol features and historical data, which increases client load and sync time despite the network’s capacity remaining the same.

The purge seeks to address these challenges by implementing history expiry, state expiry, and feature cleanup.

Noting that the Ethereum network had already started to move away from the model of all nodes storing all history forever through consensus blocks and blobs, Buterin said the chain could limit history storage by introducing an existing torrent library and an Ethereum-native solution called the Portal network.

“Reducing history storage requirements is arguably even more important than statelessness if we want to make it extremely easy to run or spin up a node: out of the 1.1 TB that a node needs to have, ~300 GB is state, and the remaining ~800 GB is history.” The post read.

Buterin proposed four viable paths that would cause objects on Ethereum to expire automatically over time while enhancing efficiency, user-friendliness, and developer-friendliness. This included implementing “statelessness’ without state expiry, state expiry with address space expansion, state expiry with address space contraction, or partial state expiry.

As for future cleanup, Buterin highlighted RLP → SSZ transition, LOG reform, data format harmonization, and eventual removal of the beacon chain sync committee mechanism as examples of protocol simplification opportunities that have been identified so far. Others include the removal of mixed-endianness and the elimination of old transaction types.

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