Bitcoin 'Breakthrough' Claims Block Size Increase Possible Without Hard Fork

Those were the prevailing opinions leading up to Mark Friedenbach's much-anticipated talk at Scaling Bitcoin Friday, where the Blockstream co-founder presented for the first time "Forward Blocks," a proposal that claims to make future, contentious changes to bitcoin - such as block size increase or proof-of-work change - easier to do.

Chief among them is the assertion that massive changes can be made to bitcoin in a backwards-compatible way, without asking every user to upgrade their software.

One issue - that many bitcoin users use the protocol to achieve a kind of sovereignty over their money, and that mandatory software changes essentially undermine that control - has long loomed over protocol changes, surfacing as a major point of contention that ultimately led to the network's infamous bitcoin cash fork.

In this way, Friedenbach's research addresses an issue cryptocurrency developers have been grappling with for ages: how, exactly, should bigger changes be made to a massive distributed system? Many would argue that more drastic bitcoin changes are, and should be, difficult, contending that as bitcoin is decentralized, and has no "King," users should be able to choose to adopt or reject changes.

As ASICs have creeped onto a number of blockchains that have sought to resist them over the past year, many have been advocating for a formal change to be made to bitcoin.

As it turns out, Forward Blocks are helpful here as well, making it possible to execute a consensus change with a soft fork rather than a hard fork.

Since it's such a general upgrade - a way to make changes, it's worth noting the two upgrades Friedenbach emphasizes - block sizes and proof-of-work - aren't the only possible applications.

Friedenbach even argues the method of change could be used for "Sharding" bitcoin to scale the protocol further, a term that evokes a technique being pursued on ethereum.

Friedenbach isn't necessarily advocating for it to be used on bitcoin either.

In the meantime, Friedenbach is planning to test the change on "Freicoin," a cryptocurrency project he co-launched years ago with a slightly different economic model than bitcoin.