You Won’t Believe What Ethereum Did With Its Gas—Solzhenitsyn Would Laugh (or Cry)

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The council of Ethereum, in their endless committees—how fond are they of those committees!—has once more sought to shape the mutinous spirit of their beloved protocol. Vitalik, that gaunt and contemplative sage of modern cryptography, steps forward with his comrade, Wahrstätter, both clutching yet another proposal to save us from doom, or at least indigestion: a proposal to tether every transaction, to tie it up like a prisoner, so it cannot graze freely upon the grassy commons of block gas.🚜

Let it be known: this draft, EIP-7983, would decree a cap—a massive 16.77 million gas units per transaction. The numbers fatigue the soul, but take them seriously, for in the current order a single transaction may devour an entire block’s ration, sowing chaos like an unruly commissar at a breadline. 🍞

It is, the developers sigh, a matter of security and predictability. The anarchic possibility—any transaction, no matter how bloated, squeezing into a block—reminds us that even in the world of machines, there are gluttons and saboteurs. The ghosts of DoS linger, and the backbone of the network creaks beneath the weight of ever more intricate DeFi and that ever-mysterious zero-knowledge math that promises privacy, but delivers headaches. 🤯

EIP-7983

With one hand, Buterin giveth, and with the other, he taketh away (just gas, not your ETH, relax). He promises that only those few, those monstrous transactions crossing the threshold, will find themselves cast out from the blocks and into the wilderness, left to meditate upon the folly of largesse. Validators, those silent sentinels, still hold the key to the block’s overall quota—a little autonomy for the proletariat, perhaps. 🔐

The manifesto frames this as purgation—a purifying fire for the protocol, trimming the excesses and restoring the spiritual minimalism whispered by Bitcoin’s ghosts. Less chaos, more reliability, and, perhaps, a slightly easier life for those who must build from the ground up, brick placed upon brick (and who must debug all the things that break).

Easing zkVM Constraints

To the coders laboring among the zkVMs and parallel engines, these endless transactions of unknowable scale are but unruly peasants armed with pitchforks. But with the cap, at last, peace: workloads neatly parceled, threads unbroken, synchrony in execution. One can almost hear the factory whistle signaling the end of shift. 🛠️

The hope: less tyranny from oversized transactions, no more single process dictating the rhythm of the entire block. Of course, those grand deployments—whales among minnows—will have to break themselves apart, divided into manageable pieces, much like any true collectivist project. But the collective good, we are assured, will endure.

EIP-7983, child of the now-dormant EIP-7825, stakes its claim for a simpler, more bearable Ethereum. Drafted, not decreed—and now, tossed into the public square for debate, where history has shown that proposals, like prisoners, may not always make it out alive. 👀

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2025-07-07 21:36