http://www.coindesk.com/hidden-history-bitcoin-unlimited/In the midst of the scaling debate, it can be difficult to uncover the genealogical roots of the various competing projects.
The internet operates at a clip that renders analysis of how an open-source project emerged closer to detective work than it should be. Add into the mix rumors, innuendo and disinformation and one really has their work cut out for them.
...They are invariably people already involved with bitcoin for many years, and BU arose primarily from a single thread on Bitcoin Talk known as "Gold Collapsing Bitcoin Up". Like numerous such threads, debates were often heated, quite personalized, and partisan.
There are certain key figures at the time who seemed to have had a real impact on giving this new community a degree of confidence to expand beyond Core.
Dr Peter Rizun was clearly a significant voice and looks to have provided much of the intellectual weight behind BU's theoretical commitments, such as how transaction fees would occur within a network without a block size limit.
The BU operation played out on that thread through the summer of 2015, gathering pace as the bitcoin blockchain began to feature ever higher fees.
According to Rizun, the four-week transactional average recorded on June 2015 had grown 376 times greater than was seen in September 2010. Bitcoin Magazine reported tens of thousands of unconfirmed transactions as the block size strained to accommodate network usage.
A little later, a post by Rizun in July 2015 noticed the average block size had bloated to 70% capacity and was continuing to surge. Discussion on Bitcoin Talk escalated, but the thread was soon locked in what the BU community read as a form of censorship.
Unlimited supporters turned to r/btc that, of course, Core supporters have tended to consider heavily censored, resulting in a kind of intellectual split that, whatever the technical details, is riven with what can appear to the outsider as quasi-conspiratorial paranoia.
The takeaway is that, once untethered from the perceived pro-Core climate of Theymos-dominated media, Bitcoin Unlimited set out on its own path, allowing for a period of off-grid development that would quietly emerge just as Core supporters assumed Segregated Witness (SegWit) would be implemented.
This essentially meant that when a form of competition did emerge, Bitcoin Core was blindsided and broadly unprepared.
