Core maintainers and highly influential CEOs alike, like Peter Smith of Blockchain and Steven Pair of BitPay, have entered the online fray, fueling passion-laden discussions across Reddit, Twitter, Medium, and GitHub.

Multiple solutions have been proposed to alleviate the block size debate, like 8MB blocks, 20MB blocks, and dynamic block size limits, among others. However, Bitcoin XT is gaining traction as a viable solution as it would create a hard fork in the protocol by permanently splitting the blockchain into two different ledgers. This fork will occur if 75% of miners adopt the new patch after January of 2016, and at that time, nodes running outdated versions of the software will not accept the valid larger blocks. One of the chief criticisms leveled at Bitcoin XT is the low threshold for adoption, with many core devs suggesting that 90% or 95% threshold for adoption would optimal. As of August 16th, 7.2% of all nodes were running Bitcoin XT, with the count growing steadily. Current statistics are available, updated hourly.

Gavin Andresen, Chief Scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, and Mike Hearn, the creator of Bitcoin XT are the chief proponents and the public faces of the patch, actively engaging with those who do not support an increase to the block size limit. Andresen developed the current patch to Bitcoin XT, which implements his BIP101 proposal. Under BIP101, the maximum block size will increase from the current 1MB to 8MB, and will double every 2 years after that until it reaches 8,192MB.