What is state rent in Ethereum? – Alexey Akhunov on Epicenter Podcast

Transcript

can you briefly recap what you mean by state rent and why we need this okay so the so first of all the this their ID or statement or some people call used to cold storage rent they it is not new idea and a lot of people entertained it back in 2014 and 15 before the theorem started but previously people were concerned about the cost of storage essentially they were looking oh you know when you're increased the what I could expand the state of aetherium by that they created a new contract or by introducing a new item into a contract storage then you pay for it once in gas

and then it's they're staying forever unless you decide to free it which you know you might not never never do and so people were representing this problem as like okay so you pay it once but then other people will have to pay for it for like till the end of time so at some point I realized that this is probably was the failure of the previous kind of rent statement researches that they concentrated on this particular cost on the cost of storage because it if you start this argument you very quickly find yourself arguing about things that you don't know like we don't know how much it costs to store these things right we don't know how much how the depending on different kind of storage

how the cost function tales offer and things like this so instead we sort of brick pivoted from this approach and realize we're going to only talk about performance implications of the state rent or sorry the not statement of the large state this is the problem that we seen is that as the etherium gets more use or even with the constant use the the size of the state grows and that brings some performance problems which we could observe it's not something that we can we speculate about it's something that we can measure and this is one of the reasons why we have this innovation simulation group to help us okay so in but the other part that it didn't answer I think is the it so if we

don't bother clearing the state that is that people use and the concern is that the state is it's probably something that you use for a while but then you you know the adapts come and go a lot of them come and go they will you know if we but the state that they've been using is in the system so everybody has to keep downloading it back and forth so what we can talk about is the total set state which is essentially let's say ten gigabytes at the moment everybody has to download ten gigabytes when they join a network then let's say that if there's a six gigabytes or eight gigabytes of this which nobody cares about like people were rarely use it it's just there

because they were there first and then there's a useful useful state which is what everybody else everybody who knew new people who come to the system they have to be content with using just two gigabytes so and so the the problem is that this this kind of the useful state kind of keeps shrinking so you essentially end up with lots of garbage in your state which everybody has to shuffle around but the actual useful space is really constrained you can you can compare it with the with let's say the state of the property market in in a like center of London or something like this where there's a lot of cows as

empty they they actually owned by somebody but nobody really lives there and then so the rest of this so all the people who want to live there they have to be content with a very small number of houses and obviously they will be have to pay a lot of money for renting them and stuff like this so in theory instead just get to get rid of this the empty houses but kind of get rid of them build new ones and redistribute them in a sense of the rent so I think our premise is that this is the the important for longevity so the system does not become kind of this dead what I call the ghost town where where there's a

empty houses and nobody can use them