The CEO of Coinbase made comments this month about how they plan to 'upgrade' their system in the second week of December, as they
undermine the core developers and
go against community sentiment about what Bitcoin is.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/coinbase-ceo-brian-armstrong-bip-is-the-best-proposal-we-ve-seen-so-far-1446584055This is a corporate move to take Bitcoin over and
turn it into something appropriate for bankers (
the XT fork WILL NEED
more updates, while
its blacklists will be updated too), who can then use it to dump their fiat into while other systems collapse and hyperinflation starts.
Not quite...
Coinbase's declarations are undermining the Blockstream takeover of bitcoin and their plan to render bitcoin unusable so that users are forced to move to off-chain solutions like the LN and Viacoin.
The community sentiment (miners, businesses, users, investors) is for increasing the block size
limit. There are several proposals to do that, and prefernces vary; but BIP101 is the only proposal that has a complete and tested implementation, and is backed by the two most competent bitcoin developers out there.
The bankers do not care about bitcoin, with small or large blocks. They have no need of another currency. They already can move fiat money across borders much faster and more cheaply than they could move bitcoins. They don't need a "distributed" ledger that is maintained by four anonymous Chinese mining pools, since they could build closed blochains that would be much faster and secure than bitcoin's -- but are still wondering whether they would be better than what they arelady have with standard distributed database technology.
BitcoinXT is not the same as BIP101. BitcoinXT is a software repository. BIP101 is a proposed way to rise the limit. If you don't like BitcoinXT, you could implement BIP101 yourself by patching BitcoinCore. BitcoinXT will remove the BIP101 code, or replace by some other BIP, if the community were to reject BIP101. BitcoinCore will eventually implement BIP101, or some other BIP, if the community maintains their support for it.
No matter how the block size war will end, there will be more changes to the protocol in the future: to fix bugs, to make it more efficient and secure, to keep up with the competition. Blockstream itself has already a few planned changes.