Vitalik Buterin’s plan to scale Ethereum 1000x

In a recent commentary on the future of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin discussed a considerable twist: the network should prioritize increasing its bandwidth (ability to handle data) over reducing latency (transaction processing speed).

Its central argument rest about the difference between what is difficult and what is physically impossible. Reducing latency, which essentially means the time it takes to confirm a transaction, is fundamentally limited by the speed of light, among other things:

“We are fundamentally limited by the speed of light and, in addition, we are also limited by […] need to support nodes in rural environments, around the world, and in home or business environments outside of data centers, need to support censorship resistance and anonymity of nodes, etc. [Quote shortened for editorial purposes].”

Although it may seem complicated, there is a relatively simple way to visualize this concept.

The Highway Analogy: Bandwidth Versus Latency

To better understand what Buterin is talking about, let’s imagine Ethereum as a highway. The problem is related to traffic: they want to transport more people.

You really only have two options:

1. Reduce transportation latency (speed) by making each car drive much faster.
2. Increase highway bandwidth (capacity) by building more lanes.

Buterin argues that Ethereum should go for the second option because trying to make cars travel faster is dangerous and fundamentally limited.

This also relates to another post he wrote five years ago titled The limits of Blockchain scalability. In it, the co-founder of Ethereum discussed a tweet from Elon Musk:

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Ideally, Doge speeds up the block time by 10 times, increases the block size by 10 times, and reduces the fee by 100 times. Then he wins without a doubt.

– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 16, 2021

Vitalik highlighted how challenging this is without sacrificing security and decentralization. In essence, he argued that ordinary people should be able to run nodes on their standard equipment (such as laptops), meaning that the blockchain is naturally limited by the capabilities of this equipment. The alternative is for nodes to run across data centers, which risks centralization:

The elites of your blockchain community, including groups, block explorers, and hosted nodes, are probably pretty well coordinated; It is very likely that everyone is on the same Telegram channels and WeChat groups. yes really want arrange a sudden change in the protocol rules to promote their own interests, then they can probably do it.

That said, he also stated that latency can in fact be reduced with existing technologies, without making any compromises. These include:

• P2P improvements (especially erasure coding), (which) can decrease message propagation times without requiring individual nodes to have lower bandwidth.
• A chain available with a smaller number of nodes per slot (for example, 512 instead of 30,000), which can eliminate the need for an aggregation step, allowing the entire active route to be performed on one subnet.

According to Buterin, this alone can scale Ethereum three to six times and is “well within the realm of possibility.”

The heartbeat of the world

And yet, this particular technical divergence defines Ethereum’s ultimate purpose: to be the heartbeat of the world rather than the The world’s video game server.

He argues that with existing technologies like PeerDAS and ZKP, the means to scale exist and Ethereum can be scaled thousands of times, at least compared to the current status quo. He also highlighted that the figures are becoming much more favorable than before and that there is no restriction that prevents “combining extreme scale with decentralization.”

Following my analogy above, this simply means that there is nothing stopping the team from building a road with as many lanes (possibly thousands) as necessary.

However, this also means that there will come a time when applications might require speeds faster than heartbeats (e.g. Ethereum). In that case, Vitalik says these applications should have off-chain components. This also means that layer two scaling solutions will continue to have a role in the future, even if Ethereum scales greatly.