EIP-4844 is currently one of the most sought after improvements to Ethereum. It is a crucial step to allowing Ethereum to scale to the next 100 million users. This article explains it using public toilets as an analogy, simple enough for any nincompoop to understand.

Consider this scenario. You’re at a crowded festival, and the men’s toilet has a huge line. The toilet only has stalls, so everyone who needs to pee and everyone who needs to poo both wait in the same line.

This is inefficient because pissers don’t require the same level of sturdiness and flow rate that poopers do. To solve this, we can add urinals, which can only be used by pissers.

This separates demand for toilets into two different lines that can now be handled independently. This is good because pissers take shorter times and less space than a full toilet, allowing the same amount of space to process far more pissers than it would poopers.

Of course, this has the disadvantage of requiring more space to be taken up in the bathroom, but since it is a relatively small cost compared to the overall cost of the bathroom and increases throughput in most cases by a lot, it is worth it.

Ok, time to explain the analogy.

• The bathroom is Ethereum.

• Toilet stalls are blocks.

• Poops are transactions.

• Piss is data. (Piss in a stall is calldata)

• Urinals are blobs.

• The lines are the fee market.

• The urinal upgrade is EIP-4844.

Blockspace has historically been taken up mostly by transactions, but with the rise of L2s, calldata has been taking up more blockspace. L2s use calldata to store their data onchain so that they can inherit the security of L1.

This has led to demand for separate use cases but we are still using the same blockspace (toilet) to handle both types (piss & poop). To solve this, EIP-4844 proposes adding ~1 mb data blobs (urinals) to each block.

This gives more space for data and allows it to operate under a different fee market from transactions. So even if gas fees are high, data can still be cheap because blob gas is separate. Aka, even if a lot of people need to poop, people can still piss if they need to.

Blob data is much more efficient because:

Data (piss) stored in blobs doesn’t need to be stored forever, and can be pruned by nodes after 1 month. Transactions (poop) are more persistent, and will stay for longer. Transactions need to be executed by every node in the network to verify the correctness. Blob data simply needs a proof that it is correct and available.

The main downside to EIP-4844 is the extra burden on validators (bathrooms) because they have to have extra space to store the blobs (urinals).

Overall, the additional throughput and cost reduction it provides for rollups is a huge benefit, reducing costs by approximately 100x! EIP-4844 is crucial for achieving Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap, and being able to scale for the next 100 million users.

You can find out more at https://www.eip4844.com/

And yes in case you’re wondering, I did get this idea from having a similar experience in a congested public toilet 😅.

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