Each time Vitalik Buterin talks about scaling Ethereum's Blockchain network I start to think about what decentralization really means.
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His latest suggestion goes into an issue many people aren't even aware exists, and that's: as more activity comes onto the network and more data accumulates, it becomes more difficult for people to maintain their own Ethereum nodes. That is a big problem because part of the entire idea behind blockchain is allowing anyone to be involved without requiring big amounts of resources.
What's his solution? "partially stateless nodes"
Rather than each node storing all of Ethereum's historical data, new nodes would retain just that data they actually require by the user's preference such as their favorite apps' records or accounts. That is to say, individuals wouldn't need to be concerned with massive hard drive space or costly servers in order to be able to connect.
The added benefit here is that it enhances privacy as well, because you decide what data you keep locally.
He also proposed deploying something called EIP-4444 in the near future. That would cap how long each node stores historical data for, and that's like about 36 days. Initially, it seemed a bit too dangerous to me, but Vitalik balances it out by offering a "communal system" in which nodes retain small pieces of older data by smartly using erasure coding (a way to split data into parts, add backups, and spread them out so it’s easy to rebuild if some parts gets lost). That way, nobody is required to keep the entire history and we don't have to rely on large corporations for storage.
Again, another thing he also mentioned as part of an attempt to scale up was to tweak gas prices a little. Storage-intensive processes would be made more expensive while processing transactions would be cheaper. I believe it's a smart move to get people to use the network regularly since the most of crypto activities is in transactions, basically money moving from one wallet to another.
Well of course other technologies such as ZK-EVMs and private retrieval tech exist out there which helps when it comes to the privacy issues, but Vitalik makes a point to acknowledge their trade-offs (their high prices and privacy loopholes). I was happy that he openly acknowledged that rather than trying to act as if all is well. What he suggested, which you'd realize is that keeping Ethereum decentralized is less about speed and cost and more about allowing people like us to participate without a lot more hassle.