The organizers of Scaling Bitcoin Conference, which is supported by the Bitcoin industry’s leading companies including Blockstream, BTCC, Kraken, and BitFury, were criticized by the Reddit BTC community for rejecting all four proposed presentations from the Bitcoin Unlimited team.

Scaling Bitcoin Conference workshops and conferences are designed to discuss the implementations of various innovative technologies in scaling the Bitcoin network efficiently and securely. The industry’s top wallet service providers, exchanges, trading platforms, and mining companies sponsor and host the workshops with hopes to reach consensus in scaling the network.

Many members of Reddit BTC, an online community established by Roger Ver and other pro-big Block supporters, have criticized the organizers of Scaling Bitcoin Conference for rejecting presentations of the Bitcoin Unlimited team, after receiving their sponsorship.

Rejected presentations

Bitcoin Unlimited, a project dedicated for the implementation of a hard fork designed to increase the Bitcoin Block size, is listed as one of the bronze sponsors of the workshops and conferences. The online community outraged over the fact that the Unlimited team received a series of emails regarding the rejection of their presentation after the Scaling Bitcoin organizers received sponsorship from the team.

Sickpig, one of the members of Bitcoin Unlimited, stated that the Bitcoin Unlimited team received 3 separate emails from Scaling Bitcoin Program Chair Matt Corallo, which explained that the proposals weren’t accepted because they weren't “up to par.”

Andrew Stone (theZerg) and Peter Rizun received similar emails from the team regarding the rejection of their proposals. Rizun further stated that the rejected presentations were:

  • Xthin: A Bloom Filter Based Technique to Improve Block Propagation Across the P2P Network
  • Subchains Facilitate On-chain Scaling and Fast Transaction Verification
  • Scaling Bitcoin by Sharding the Blockchain

Some members of the Reddit BTC community suspected that the presentations were rejected because thin Blocks are already running on the network and sharding the Blockchain presentation were introduced last year.

Although it is highly unlikely that these presentations were rejected simply because they supported Bitcoin Unlimited, it is becoming a controversial discussion amongst Core and Unlimited supporters.