As of August 15th, there is now a full release available.

Such a fork has never happened before. I want to explain things from the perspective of the Bitcoin XT developers: let it not be said there was insufficient communication.

Bitcoin forking is a topic that may interest many people, so this article is meant for a general audience. It doesn't assume previous knowledge of the debate.

The founding vision for Bitcoin was carefully laid out by Satoshi, and has always been crystal clear. This dispute is about growth. In 2008 he responded to the first question ever asked about Bitcoin's design with a simple statement:

Visa processed 37 billion transactions in FY2008, or an average of 100 million transactions per day. That many transactions would take 100GB of bandwidth, or the size of 12 DVD or 2 HD quality movies, or about $18 worth of bandwidth at current prices.

If the network were to get that big, it would take several years, and by then, sending 2 HD movies over the Internet would probably not seem like a big deal.

He was in many ways more blasé about scaling Bitcoin up than any of us have ever been. He planned for Bitcoin to become popular right from the start, and knew that success would change how people used his system. In 2010 he said this:

It would be nice to keep the [block chain] files small as long as we can.

The eventual solution will be to not care how big it gets.

But for now, while it's still small, it's nice to keep it small so new users can get going faster. When I eventually implement client-only mode, that won't matter much anymore.