Vitalik Buterin now advances a divisive plan to preserve Ethereum. The proposal introduces a rent fee that users remit for every byte hour their data occupies the distributed ledger.
The fee forces each participant to cover the cost of replicating and storing that participant’s state across every validator node. Transaction volume on Ethereum has surged – the state now exceeds one hundred gigabytes and doubles each year. The rent yields two results – the protocol collects revenue that pays for disk space – accounts that refuse payment lose access to associated contract storage and balances.
Developer Raul Jordan labels the present model âunsustainable.â Jordan states: âNo one enjoys rent, yet the discussion is overdue.â
Core contributors voice guarded support. The protocol will cap the total state at five hundred gigabytes per node. A price oracle sets the rent per byte second. Users pre pay for chosen durations – expired entries prune automatically.
The mechanism is simple, yet any new charge provokes resistance.
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