The New Effort to Change Bitcoin

More broadly, developers have long worried about bitcoin's level of "centralization," or the measure of how much control single stakeholders have over the technology. (Decentralization is seen as a key differentiator, one that makes bitcoin more unprecedented in the history of money.)

Further, they've argue that if this problem goes unaddressed, mining centralization might lead bitcoin to turn into something resembling the financial system it's supposed to replace.

To attempt to put this problem to rest, developers have put forth a variety of potential technical fixes.

Against this backdrop, Dubrovsky grew interested in changing proof-of-work as a solution, deciding to work on the idea about a year ago as he became convinced optical PoW was the best solution.

"I think it will be difficult, but what we are proposing is not just an improvement," he told CoinDesk. "Something like this is a necessity if cryptocurrency is going to be truly decentralized and used to securely store and move trillions of dollars of value."