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