Bitcoin Community Members and Developers Propose Changing Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work
The past week in bitcoin-land it’s been quite a ride, to say the least. Scaling topics have now eclipsed all discussions concerning the March 10 ETF decision. Most of the “community” is now focused on the block size debate and the possibility of a hard fork in the near future. There are those who vehemently oppose a hard fork and have decided to come up with solutions to avoid the situation by proposing some ideas that are very controversial. This week community members and Bitcoin Core developers such as Luke-jr have been discussing trying to change Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm.
Of course, the discussion of changing PoW has stirred contentious arguments once again. Many people within the community believe the PoW consensus mechanism is one foundation within Bitcoin’s code that should never change. However, the group discussing the algorithm change are afraid of “de facto control” by a great majority of the network hashrate. The group has pushed the conversation further by creating a website, and a Twitter handle to promote the idea.
“A call for research, testing, and finally implementation of a decentralization-friendly algorithm for Bitcoin’s proof-of-work,” explains the BTC PoW Initiative website. “Bitcoin has been unable to implement a scaling solution due to greedy miners who want to keep fees high and who even mine empty blocks, not caring that it increases network congestion. — Changing the proof-of-work will fire the current crop of miners and open the door for quickly and easily scaling the network.”
