tl;dr
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed a 36-day limit on Ethereum node history to make running personal nodes more efficient and accessible. He emphasized the importance of personal nodes for privacy, censorship resistance, and decentralization, noting that full nodes have become resource-...
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed limiting node history storage to 36 days to empower more users to run personal nodes. This aims to preserve Ethereum's decentralization, privacy, and censorship resistance by reducing the resource burden of full nodes, which have become increasingly demanding and pushed users toward centralized services.
To maintain the blockchain’s long-term data availability without relying on centralization, Buterin suggests a distributed storage system using erasure coding. This method fragments and distributes historical data across the network, ensuring that Ethereum's "blockchain is forever" principle remains intact.
Additionally, Buterin recommends revising Ethereum’s gas pricing model to discourage excessive state storage by increasing fees on state creation activities like deploying contracts and creating new storage slots. Simultaneously, lowering execution costs could make network interactions more efficient and less costly.
A novel concept introduced is that of "partially stateless nodes," which store only the subsets of blockchain state relevant to the user. These nodes retain the ability to verify blocks and respond to RPC requests within their data scope but rely on cryptographic proofs or external services for other data. This model balances efficiency with trustless verification and enhances user choice.
Buterin emphasizes that the health and decentralization of Ethereum depend on users’ ability to operate personal nodes in a resource-efficient way. By implementing his proposals—such as EIP-4444 limiting stored history, distributed storage for old data, updated gas pricing, and partially stateless nodes—the network could ease demands on node operators while safeguarding Ethereum’s core values.