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Reading https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/05/09/multidim.html
TLDR
Ethereum is exploring multidimensional gas pricing to improve network efficiency and scalability.
Key Points 
- Ethereum currently uses a single “gas” resource to price transactions, which can lead to inefficiencies.
- Multidimensional gas pricing separates different types of resource usage (e.g. computation, data, storage) and prices them independently.
- This allows the network to better match supply and demand for each resource, improving overall throughput.
- Ethereum has already implemented multidimensional pricing for “blobs” (rollup data) with the Dencun hard fork.
- Future plans include multidimensional pricing for storage proofs needed by stateless clients.
- Challenges include integrating multidimensional pricing into the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and sub-calls.
In-depth Summary
Ethereum currently uses a single “gas” resource to price transactions, which combines different types of computational effort like raw computation, storage access, and data bandwidth. While this leads to a simple market design, it can be inefficient as it treats these resources as mutually convertible when their underlying limits are distinct.
To address this, Ethereum has been exploring the concept of “multidimensional gas” pricing. The key idea is to have separate prices and limits for different types of resource usage, allowing the network to better match supply and demand for each one.
One example is the Dencun hard fork, which introduced a separate “blob” resource for rollup data. Blobs have their own price and limit, separate from the main gas limit. This has allowed rollup transaction costs to drop by 100x while only increasing the theoretical maximum block size by 37%.
Another area of interest is supporting stateless clients, which verify blocks without storing the full Ethereum state. Stateless clients require proofs of the state data accessed by each block, and the bandwidth needed for these proofs may exceed what can be efficiently handled with a single gas limit. Multidimensional pricing could help by separately limiting and pricing the storage access component.
Implementing multidimensional gas pricing in the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) comes with challenges, particularly around handling sub-calls between contracts. The EVM’s current gas limit model assumes a single resource, so extending it to multiple dimensions requires careful design.
Overall, multidimensional gas pricing appears to be a promising direction for improving Ethereum’s scalability and efficiency, but there is still work to be done to integrate it seamlessly into the protocol.
ELI5
Ethereum currently has one way to measure how much a transaction costs, called “gas”. But this gas measure tries to combine different things like computation, storage, and data - even though those things have different limits on how much the network can handle.
The new idea is to have separate measurements and prices for each of those different things. That way, the network can better balance how much of each resource is being used, and make the whole system more efficient.
They’ve already tried this with a new kind of data called “blobs”, which has its own separate price and limit. And they’re looking at doing the same for the storage proofs needed for a new type of Ethereum client called “stateless clients”.
It’s a bit tricky to make all this work smoothly with the current Ethereum system, but the potential benefits in terms of scalability and efficiency are worth the effort.
Writer’s Main Point
The main point of the article is that Ethereum is exploring the use of multidimensional gas pricing, where different types of resource usage (computation, data, storage, etc.) are priced and limited separately. This has the potential to significantly improve the network’s efficiency and scalability, but also comes with some technical challenges that need to be carefully addressed.