Opinion · Oct 10, 2026

Bitcoin's body stayed on the old chain. Its soul moved to XBT.

By xbt.live · 5 minute read

Before BIP-110, most of us thought Bitcoin had a problem. Maybe it was even sick: blocks filling with data that wasn't money, fees paid by people who didn't care about money at all. When BIP-110 failed to activate, we found out it was worse than sick. It was terminal.

The diagnosis

A sick patient can recover if the body still fights. What BIP-110 signaling day showed is that Bitcoin's immune system had been taken over. A handful of SHA-256 mining pools decided which rules won, and the hashers behind them couldn't or wouldn't walk away. We covered how that happened in They can't just switch pools. The pools had become too big to fail, and too big to challenge.

Like any disease, it spread. It spread through paid voices who told users nothing was wrong, and through free riders who were happy to let someone else defend the network as long as their bags went up. Meanwhile, the people steering Bitcoin Core kept pushing it toward a general-purpose data layer, something closer to Ethereum than to money. Asked to say plainly what Bitcoin is for, they wouldn't. We will: Bitcoin is money.

Life support

So the patient was moved to the emergency room. In August, the SHA-256 miners left on their own chain, and the nodes enforcing BIP-110's rules kept going without them. At the end of the month, the rule-keeping chain switched its mining to BLAKE2b so the captured SHA-256 hash couldn't take it over. That chain is XBT. The full story is in How Bitcoin kept its rules and moved to BLAKE2b.

Patients on life support don't look healthy, and XBT doesn't either. About 102 XBT buy one BTC. It has had three bear markets in six weeks. That's what a rescue looks like from the outside. The people in the ER right now, the node runners, the miners, the builders shipping wallets and pools every week, are doing the work while the outcome is anything but certain. If the patient makes it, they're the ones who saved it.

The strangest part: you already own it

If you held bitcoin before Aug 8, 2026, you hold XBT. Same coins, same addresses, same keys. The proof of work that secured your coins for 17 years secures them on both chains, because the history is identical up to block 961,631. Every UTXO that existed before the split exists on XBT. The XBT you hold cost you exactly what your BTC cost you.

Since the split, the two histories have gone different ways. XBT's blocks follow BIP-110's rules: less data that isn't money, a cleaner chain going forward. Not sure what you hold? Check an address.

Two places at once

So where is Bitcoin right now? In a sense, it's in two places.

The body is still on the old chain: the brand, the network effect, the exchange listings, the ticker everyone knows. That doesn't disappear overnight, and we won't pretend it does.

But the thing that made Bitcoin worth caring about was never the brand. It was the idea: money that no state, no company and no small group of operators can change on users without their consent. That idea now lives on the chain whose users enforced their rules when it mattered. The body stayed. The soul moved.

Bitcoin was always a quiet way to separate money from the state. It still is. It just lives somewhere new.

How Bitcoin kept its rules Do I have XBT?

Opinion. Not financial advice. XBT trades on thin markets and can lose most of its value quickly. Price figures as of the evening of Oct 10, 2026 (US Eastern).