What’s the Maximum Ethereum Block Size?
The truth is: there is no maximum Ethereum block size. While Bitcoin has a fixed block size of 1 mb, Ethereum’s block size varies.
What determines Ethereum block size?
Instead of a fixed limit, Ethereum block size is bound by how many units of gas can be spent per block. This limit is known as the block gas limit (sometimes confused with transaction gas limit). At the time of writing this, miners are currently accepting blocks with an average block gas limit of around 10,000,000 gas. Currently, the average Ethereum block size is anywhere between 20 to 30 kb in size.
What determines Ethereum’s gas limit?
Ethereum miners determine what the maximum gas limit should be by signalling it to the network each block. Miners are given this ability to adjust this rate because changes to the gas limit affects the resources necessary to effectively mine Ethereum.
How many Ethereum transactions fit into a block?
It depends on how much gas each transaction spends. The answer to this question varies because not every transaction is the same size. For example, the base cost of any transaction is 21,000 units of gas. (Don’t confuse this with gas price which is how many gwei you’d pay per unit of gas.) However, transactions that are more complex or require more storage on the blockchain will cost you more gas. Generally, the more operations a transaction executes, the more it will cost in gas. Theoretically, someone could spend all of a block’s gas limit in one transaction.
How does an adjustable block size affect network performance?
The biggest benefit of an adjustable block size is that the Ethereum blockchain chooses how it wants to scale. Users and developers determine the demand for gas. And, miners are able to choose what gas limit or block size is viable to their operations. When the Ethereum network is experiencing full blocks, it has the option to raise the gas limit. However, it’s worth noting storing data on the blockchain is costly and there comes a point where layer 2 options are the preferable scaling solution.
Raising the gas limit has the potential to increase the average block size, ultimately affecting the cost of node on the Ethereum network. Larger block sizes means that the space required to store the Ethereum blockchain grows faster. Bigger blocks and the possibility of less nodes on the network can affect Ethereum’s uncle rate. These are all factors taken into consideration when the Ethereum community choices whether to support changing Ethereum’s gas limit.
Follow us on Twitter or come chat with us on Discord to learn more about the Ethereum blockchain.
