PoWx: The New Effort to Change Bitcoin Mining Explained

Story by: Alyssa Hertig

A long-controversial bid to change bitcoin just got a big boost.

Boasting the support of tenured developers, a non-profit foundation called PoWx launched this week with the goal of putting a more sophisticated wrapper on the idea that proof-of-work (PoW), the way the network comes to agreement on which transactions are valid, could be replaced with a newer, supposedly better, algorithm.

In short, PoWx advocates bitcoin adopt a new technology it calls “optical” proof-of-work, which uses a more energy-efficient laser technology as the cornerstone of mining.

The hope is to “fix” mining by making it easier for more people to participate in the process, in part, because the barriers to entry have become so prohibitive. (At the beginning in 2009, users just needed a simple laptop to run the code to mine bitcoins. Now, they need to purchase specialized computers costing thousands of dollars and which they don’t do anything else.)

Not to mention, the developers behind PoWx are the latest to point to one mining firm, Bitmain, and its influence on the network as a major issue. Though exact numbers are cloudy, estimates say the company is manufacturing between 50 and 80 percent of bitcoin’s mining hardware.

Against this backdrop, the idea of swapping bitcoin’s mining algorithm has been around for some time, mostly flaring up in times of perceived crisis. It’s been seen almost as a last resort to be deployed only in the case miners do something really bad, such as colluding to attack the network.

But PoWx founder Michael Dubrovsky sees the change as an inevitability.

He calls mining centralization bitcoin’s “Seldon Crisis,” a specific type of earth-shattering issue found in the famous sci-fi series “Foundation” and which denotes a point of no return.

Original story: https://www.coindesk.com/powx-the-new-effort-to-change-bitcoin-and-whos-backing-it/

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