According to the software engineer and co-founder of Blockstream, Mark
According to the software engineer and co-founder of Blockstream, Mark Friedenbach it is possible to make contentious changes to bitcoin such as increase of block size or to make it change the proof of work. Mark presented a proposal “Forward Blocks” for the first time.
Marke is an independent Bitcoin protocol developer who has also worked at NASA-Ames Research Center as a contractor. He is known for doing projects of blockchain scalability, asset extensions to Bitcoin, and privacy-enhancing technology. Forward Blocks is a big announcement by Mark. According to Mark, it is possible to make massive changes to the Bitcoin in a backward compatible way, without even asking users to upgrade their software.
Most of the Bitcoin users use the protocol to achieve a kind of sovereignty over their money. The mandatory software changes undermine the control. These are the main points of the contention which led to the Bitcoin cash fork. The research conducted by Mark addresses the issue which is faced by most of the cryptocurrency developers such as how exactly the bigger changes can be made to a massively distributed system? Most of the crypto developers believe that big changes to the Bitcoin can only be made with a hard fork. Hard fork is a change which is not backwards compatible and requires all the crypto’s users to upgrade to keep up with the changes.
“Most of the scaling debate is wrapped up in the issue of how to do a hard fork safety, and when, if ever, we should do a hard fork for scaling purpose,”
According to Mark, this was the case before Forward Blocks but now it is not a problem anymore. Mark said:
“Forward Blocks makes that whole argument pointless. We don’t need a hard to scale Bitcoin, if and when we decide to do so. It can be accomplished as a soft fork like SegWit was.”
Mark said that opt-in changes to the Bitcoin network which was used last year can also be used to make big changes.
Mark Friedenbach is planning to test the soft fork on the cryptocurrency Freicoin, a cryptocurrency which he co-launched years ago with the different economic model than Bitcoin. If Freicoin finds the upgrading methods useful then the method of upgrading will be tested on other cryptos. So it will take time to know whether Mark’s methods of up gradation the network will work or not.