In an announcement made on the Bitcoin development mailing list, Bitcoin core developer and Bitcoin Foundation chief scientist Gavin Andresen suggested that, if the development community could reach no consensus on increasing the one-megabyte block size limit, he would shift his efforts from the main Bitcoin implementation (Bitcoin core) to the alternative Bitcoin-Xt implementation. Such a move could represent a watershed moment for Bitcoin as a whole, as it would mean that its former lead developer would effectively leave his own project to join a forked version. Bitcoin-Xt is a patch placed on top of Bitcoin core and developed by …