Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, outlined a possible roadmap for the “Purge” upgrade in his latest article, aiming to gradually address the complexity and “bloat” issues of Layer 1.
In the article published on October 26th, Vitalik stated that the bloat of a protocol primarily stems from feature additions and accumulated historical data. Currently, running an Ethereum node requires approximately 1.1TB of disk space for executing a user client (connecting to the Ethereum network and holding its data) and several hundred GB of storage space for a consensus client (implementing Ethereum’s proof-of-stake consensus mechanism).
He suggested that reducing the need for each node to permanently store all historical records, in addition to unnecessary protocol features, can achieve the goal of reducing bloat while still maintaining the permanence of the blockchain.
He also proposed some methods to effectively clear Ethereum’s state, including account balances, contract code, and contract storage, which can cause the storage requirements of a client to continuously increase.
In a recent series of articles exploring the “Merge,” “Surge,” “Scourge,” and “Verge” upgrades, Vitalik wrote in the fifth article about “The Purge”:
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