To Scale Bitcoin, Little Improvements Will Need to Go a Long Way

Kaizen.

The Japanese word for “improvement,” and as it relates to business, it’s the philosophy of continuous improvement on working practices. And with that as the tagline for the fifth edition of bitcoin engineering conference Scaling Bitcoin, it became a perfect way to summarize what’s happening today among the cryptocurrency’s developer ecosystem.

With the scaling debate coming to a head last year – and ending with a group of big block supporting enthusiasts breaking off to form competing cryptocurrency bitcoin cash and bitcoin getting the long-awaited code upgrade Segregated Witness (SegWit) – this year’s Scaling Bitcoin conference just didn’t have the flair that perhaps past events had.

What seemed pulled from another piece of the kaizen philosophy – the notion of eliminating waste for a lean business – many of the talks over the two-day conference held at Keio University in Tokyo revolved around little updates that could make a big difference in terms of efficiency…