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

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 - 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 of the network.

From figuring out what to do with the vast amount of so-called dust on the network to fine-tuning the lightning network, Scaling Bitcoin seemed to present a much more relaxed and focused developer community.

Jameson Lopp, a bitcoin developer and engineer at bitcoin security startup Casa, agreed.

One area of small improvements that several presentations touched on was the massive amount of UTXOs, or unspent transaction outputs - especially those holding bitcoin dust.

Looking at the question with 110 satoshi's per byte in mind, according to Segura, about 50 percent of UTXOs are actually dust - meaning those pieces of bitcoin are unlikely to ever be spent.

As bitcoin attracts more users, Segura said, the amount of dust-based UTXOs will grow, and it will grow unbounded because that's how the system was built.

Secondly, a good coin selection algorithm, which decides which bits of date come together to create a user's bitcoin transaction, will also help.

During a Bitcoin Core developer meeting on Monday, October 8, Tadge Dryja, a developer and the co-author of the lightning network paper, proposed a similar thing.

Scaling Bitcoin badge on computer image via CoinDesk.