The founder and CEO of Coinbase will appear at the meeting of bitcoin industry leaders. The information about his reufsal to participate in the meeting came from the fake account

The invitation was sent by Adam Back, President of Blockstream, through his Twitter:

Brian are you persuadable to come to Satoshi Roundtable 26-29th? discuss in person professionally with ecosystem CEOs?

The proposal was supported by Victoria van Eyk and Bruce Fenton who wrote: “Brian, you are welcome to join.  We will find room for you.”

Brian t Armstrong told he appreciated the invitation and seemed to hesitate whether to come or not. Some minutes later hacker whose account was very similar to Armstrongs' answered: “Thank u Adam, I respect your work & engagement but we need to compete and be on different teams. Just like browsers.”

The news about the refusal of Armstrong added oil to the fire of block size discussion. Several news sides (including CoinFox) reported that Armstrong will not participate to the Satoshi RoundTable. However later real Brian Armstrong informed the community that he will participate in the discussion. 

On 21 February, the majority of bitcoin industry leaders together with many Bitcoin Core developers agreed to implement the SegWit in April and activate a hard-fork solution by July 2017. Armstrong preferred to back the alternative solution, Bitcoin Classic, providing for an immediate increase of the maximum bitcoin block size to 2 MB. Over the next two days, he was joined by Wences Casares of Xapo and Slush Pool, a Czech-based bitcoin mining pool accounting for 5.7% of hashing power on the bitcoin network. Bitcoin community is divided again, and supporters of one group accuse another of being “anti-bitcoin”.

The same attitude can be seen in the Reddit discussion of Adam Back’s invitation. While some criticise Armstrong for not accepting the invitation and putting interests of Coinbase above those of bitcoin, others express their scorn for Back’s “patronising attitude”. One user reasonably asked: “Do you think there is a chance that Adam will see Brian's side, and accept to do a hard fork? If no, then what is Brian going to do at the roundtable at all?”

Alexey Tereshchenko