The Bitcoin scaling debate continues, with everyone presenting their solutions and opinions. The undecided Bitcoin community is however at odds, wondering whether to increase the block size or not. If they indeed increase, what should be the ideal block size, and so on?
A group of community members have started yet another initiative to influence scaling by creating a hard fork of the Bitcoin blockchain. The group has taken to Reddit, creating a subreddit called BTCFork. The group created a few months ago was initially hailed as a new movement, with people expecting some radical changes to the Bitcoin blockchain in the near future.
The BTCFork subreddit hasn’t stood up to the expectations, at least until now. The community there has created a proposal on GitHub where they discuss the path forward. They believe that the current process curtails the Bitcoin community’s freedom of choice, making it almost impossible to propose and implement a proposal without the blessings of Bitcoin Core developers. The decision-making authority has moved from the community to a cartel of miners and core developers.
The BTCFork community expresses its intention to democratize the whole process again by implementing a hard fork that conforms with Bitcoin’s original vision. Their Bitcoin evolutionary process is divided into 3 parts – Consensus Abstraction Layers, Accelerated Concept Development, and Implementation Readiness Levels.
Consensus Abstraction Layers offer a way to assess and track changes made to the blockchain by the developer community. It brings in accountability among the participants while facilitating consensus mechanism to implement changes.
The Accelerated Concept Development, is more like a rapid prototyping feature on the blockchain, allowing continued development of blockchain based on the predefined requirements of each proposal. These proposals are prototyped on branches, which can be adopted directly after review and consensus.
Implementation Readiness Levels serves as an indicator of the maturity of proposals. This will allow the community to track the progress made on each proposal. By keeping IRL as a reference, developers can work on improving various aspects of the code to meet the required standards.
The complete BTCFork proposal is available here.
It is now necessary for BTCFork to gain the required momentum to actually start implementing their Bitcoin scalability proposal. Maybe, if things go right, it may solve the ongoing Bitcoin scaling debate for good.
Ref: r/BTCFork | GitHub | Image: NewsBTC
