The block size wars and the SegWit update “serve as a case in point” to show that “changes can be made,” Faber, senior vice president, Government Affairs at Environmental Working Group , one of the groups spearheading the campaign, told CoinDesk.
According to Skar, there are two key questions as to whether the network can change; first, whether it is technically feasible.
“Despite skepticism,” the campaigners don’t see a good reason why enough support will not be eventually garnered, said Skar.
EWG’s Cook pointed to an October 2021 paper from the U.S.
After two years of controversy, an update to the Bitcoin network called Segregated Witness was adopted through a soft fork, meaning users could still keep running the old version of the software.
Four of the companies were directly involved in mining, one of them being CoinDesk’s parent company, Digital Currency Group , which also owns U.S.
But, six months later, the supposedly powerful signatories backed down and called off the hard fork, or backward-incompatible code change, citing lack of sufficient consensus.
Asked about the controversy around block sizes and the fact that some changes were never implemented, Skar said that “five years is a long time in Bitcoin’s relatively short history.
SegWit was implemented because the Bitcoin community understood it was key to the network’s success, Faber said.
Regulators are not going to stand by as the climate crisis grows worse and worse and digital currencies like bitcoin use more and more electricity, and produce more and more greenhouse gas emissions,” Faber said.
Even if it were possible, implementing a change to the protocol is not the whole story.
But the key to changing Bitcoin is to convince “an overwhelming majority of economic activity on Bitcoin to use” the new code, Nick said.
The blocksize wars indicated that users control the direction of the protocol, which means that more coordination is needed to be undertaken to make wholesale changes to the network.
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