The ‘Purge’ – Vitalik’s plan to reduce Ethereum inflammation
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has released the fifth part of his blog series on the future path of the blockchain network titled “The Purge,” which aims to reduce data bloat and simplify the Ethereum protocol.
The cleanup focuses on cutting unnecessary data storage and eliminating obsolete features while maintaining the “sustainability” of the blockchain to make Ethereum more efficient.
The cleanup is not designed to directly affect Ethereum gas fees. However, the proposed changes could improve network performance and reduce operating costs.
The Purge Roadmap showing the plan to simplify the protocol and eliminate technical debt. Source: vitalik.eth
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Reducing storage for better node operations
A key part of The Purge is to address the increasing number of new nodes looking to join the Ethereum network and increasing storage requirements.
A fully syncronized Ethereum node currently requires more than 1.17 terabytes (TB) of storage — mainly due to historical data, according to ycharts data.
Purge aims to cut customer storage requirements by “reducing or eliminating the need for each node” to permanently store all history.
“[…] And maybe finally explain.
A chart showing the current data required for full synchronization on the Ethereum network. Source: ycharts
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Expiration period
Buterin's post also highlighted the current nature of the network, showing that any newly created state information is stored forever, meaning that the state is constantly expanding.
“State is much harder to ‘time out' than history, because EVMs are fundamentally designed with the assumption that once a state object is created, it will always be there and can be read at any time by any transaction.
As a layman, any new data added to the network remains there permanently, causing the system to grow, but Buterin wants to prevent this with “partial state expiration”.
This new idea involves erasing rarely accessible state data and reviving it through cryptographic authentication when necessary.
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Go to stateless verification
Buterin's Purge blog post follows The Verge's October 23 announcement that it is designed to make nodes on the Ethereum network more secure and accessible.
The Verge update aims to reduce the hardware requirements for blockchain block verification without storing large amounts of data in “stateless verification”.
This new authentication method “makes it computationally affordable for every mobile wallet, browser wallet, and even smartwatch” to run a node on the network to fully verify the chain.
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