Controversial Opinion: To stake Ethereum should need a computer costing around 1 Eth to buy so the blocktime can be reduced and/or the gas limit increased.

Currently you can run a validator on a Raspberry Pi 8GB. Clients are still young for Eth 2.0 and further refinements to them will reduce the stress on CPUs and disks.

Now it is a noble thing to be able to run your blockchain on hardware as cheap and low powered as the Raspberry Pi however to stake you also need 32 Eth current value around $110,000.

If we up the minimum spec to run a node to a 16 core CPU, 64GB of ECC RAM, 5x2TB SSDs in RAID, UPS, 4G/5G fallback for your internet connection then this would still cost less than 1 Ether. This would be able to run multiple validators for pools and whales as each additional validator you add requires only a little additional work

However it would allow a reduction in block time and an increase in gas. How much? I don't know, however I would say we could halve the (post merge) blocktime to 6 seconds and double the gas limit to average 30,000,000 per block for a 4x throughput increase (probably significantly more).

What will this achieve? Firstly it will take some pressure of L1 while layer 2 is developing. Layer 2 solutions are probably 1 year out to being the main way of interacting with the chain. It will also give more blockspace to layer 2.

The major problem would be state bloat. However Vitalek has a plan.

https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/verkle_and_state_expiry_proposal

This should be up and running within a couple of years which shoud solve state bloat problems forever. The current Ethereum state is around 400GB so even with 4x the traffic 8TB of disk space should last until this is implemented.

Ethereum is bursting at the seams right now and this will just give a little breathing space while the solutions already being developed (L2, sidechains, sharding) take shape.

Thoughts?