Mark Friedenbach recently presented ‘Forward Blocks’ at the Scaling Bitcoin 2018 "Kaizen" conference. Forward blocks are a way to change the proof of work (POW) algorithm, increase the block size, and increase the transaction capacity without a hard fork. He claims that, with sharding, the transaction rate of BTC could reach 30000 tx/s, making it comparable to VISA. I certainly cannot discuss the technical details but will share with you the relationship between forward blocks and Freicoin.
Mark Friedenbach (Maaku) and Jorge Timón created Freicoin in 2012 and then went on to found Blockstream. While Freidenbach and Timón were Bitcoin Core developers, Freicoin fell somewhat into neglect and out of popularity. Its small community made efforts to revive the coin since 2016, even builing an exchange to trade it, FreiExchange.com. Recently, Maaku left Blockstream to focus on his own creative projects, returning to Freicoin. Maaku has already stated that many aspects of forward blocks will be developed on Freicoin. In fact, the very origins of forward blocks come from wanting to change the POW algorithm for Freicoin (see link 'origins' below).
While the 'forward blocks' proposal for Bitcoin does not require a hard fork, this is not the same with Freicoin. There is an important technical difference between Bitcoin and Freicoin. The large capacity increase in BTC possible after forward blocks takes advantage of a bug in Bitcoin that has never been fixed known as 'time warp bug'. This bug has already been fixed in Freicoin. Because of this, the same capacity increase can not happen in Freicoin and a hard fork may still be required. That is yet to be finalized by the developers. However, the other benefits such as POW change, sharding , and CT support are currently being developed.
So, while Freicoin was created in 2012, the announcement of 'forward blocks' is similar to a new white paper in today’s ICO world that rivals them in scaling solutions proposed and developer's skill. Currently, Freicoin is ranked at around 1000 on Coin Market Cap and is only trading on FreiExchange.com. It now has the potential to be in the top 100 and reaching a price of 0.01 BTC.
Links:
paper: http://freico.in/forward-blocks-scalingbitcoin-paper.pdf?ref=tokendaily
slides: http://freico.in/forward-blocks-scalingbitcoin-slides.pdf
video:
origins: https://freicoinalliance.com/topic/638-changing-the-proof-of-work-algorithm/
relevant tweets:
https://twitter.com/markfriedenbach/status/1048945300629385217?s=12
- markfriedenbach