- Mark Friedenbach proposes an idea to end Bitcoin’s scalability problem.
- Mark’s idea will scale up the number of transaction per block without a hard fork.
- Sharding to be introduced on the Bitcoin network to end censorship.
A former developer at NASA, who is now a Bitcoin (BTC) protocol developer, Mark Friedenbach, at the Scaling Bitcoin Workshop in Tokyo on the 5th of October, shared his idea on what he thinks is the best way to increase Bitcoin (BTC) block sizes for better performance without the need for a hard fork.
Not A Proposal, But An Idea
Mark, who noted that he wasn’t in any way proposing what should happen but merely suggesting a starting point to which the community can start thinking of a viable solution to the issues surrounding the network without having to implement an update that will require nodes on the network to upgrade. Hence suggesting a change to the current PoW algorithm by introducing a new Proof-of-Work with a soft fork, which is considered a backward-compatible option.
According to him, calling the network this way will increase “settlement transaction volume to 3584x current levels.” He also proffered a solution to censorship resistance using Sharding. In order not to get things mixed up, he clearly differentiated the proposed Sharding from Ethereum’s proposed solution which is set to be implemented in coming upgrade but borrowed the word as he things its best fits in explaining his solution.
At the moment, the Bitcoin network is limited by the number of transactions it’s able to process each second as a result of a small block size. Though this was sufficient at some point, as the number of users on the network grew, so also was the need for larger blocks which will give more room for transaction processing.
Nevertheless, Mark’s proposition will be joining a host of others that have been proposed by different individuals and groups in the past.
What The Community Thinks
Just like every other proposal in the past, Mark’s idea hasn’t been without some compliments and criticisms.
While many think of this solution as revolutionary, with Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream giving some credit to Mark Friedenback while saying it can be a useful tool which will see to the blockchain problems finally resolved. Other members of the community have castigated this saying the whole idea is a network attach which claims to be an upgrade.
