the split — bitcoinxor

What happened

Through 2026, a long-running dispute over transaction filtering came to a head. A proposed soft fork would have made certain filtering rules consensus; it needed 55% of mining hashrate to signal support and drew under 3%. The nodes that enforce those rules anyway — largely Bitcoin Knots — kept enforcing them.

On 8 August 2026, enforcing nodes rejected a block the rest of the network accepted. From that moment there have been two valid chains, each following its own rules:

The majority-hashrate chain — followed by Bitcoin Core and nearly all existing SHA256d mining hardware.
The enforcing chain — followed by Bitcoin Knots nodes. For three weeks after the split, block production on the enforcing chain was very slow, because only a small fraction of SHA256d hashrate mined it. On 30 August 2026 it carried out its planned proof-of-work change — the hard fork this site's tools exist for — so that SHA256d hardware cannot attack or dominate it. Since block 961640 the enforcing chain is mined with BLAKE2b-256 and produces blocks regularly again.

The split point, precisely

These are chain facts you can verify against any node — see run a node for how.

Height	Block
961631 last shared block	00000000000000000000807f9dc917442a67910426d79ebb2f8aa2149327ce8a
961632 first enforcing-chain block	0000000000000000000169eb6f811ddbd0daf343af7b62180cdb13e7c78dbc16

If your node's block 961632 matches the hash above, you are on the enforcing chain. If it differs, you are on the majority chain.

Timeline

Date	Event
2017	A proof-of-work-change hard fork is drafted as a contingency measure (the design lineage behind today's plan).
2026	The filtering soft fork fails to reach its 55% signaling threshold.
2026-08-08	Chain split at block 961632 — the first block the two chains disagree on.
2026-08-11	New proof-of-work algorithm selected by a deterministic public procedure: BLAKE2b-256.
2026-08	Final specification published and shipped: a redesigned 164-byte block header and the BLAKE2b-256 hash pipeline, in the Bitcoin Knots v29.4.1 release-candidate series.
2026-08-30	Proof-of-work change activates at height 961640 — the first BLAKE2b block, mined at 06:14 UTC, two days ahead of the proposed 1 September date. Echoing the genesis block, its coinbase carries a newspaper headline: "8-30 NYPost Deride And Conquer".

What this means for you

If you hold bitcoin Your coins from before the split exist on both chains, and your keys control both. Nothing about the split can take them from you, and there is nothing you must do urgently. Read wallet safety before moving anything.

If you run a node — or want to A chain split is exactly the moment to verify for yourself rather than trust an explorer or an exchange. Running a node takes an afternoon and settles "which chain am I on" with your own hardware.

If you want to mine Since the proof-of-work change, SHA256d ASICs are irrelevant on the enforcing chain — and retired BLAKE2b hardware from the Sia era took over from block one, at rates no CPU or GPU touches. See mining for the real numbers and where you fit.

Where to verify claims

Fork events attract misinformation from every direction. Primary sources:

bitcoinknots.org — official Bitcoin Knots releases and network status.
Your own node — the only source that can't lie to you about which chain you're on.

This site is independent tooling and documentation — not an official project voice. Everything above is stated as chain fact you can check against your own node, and this page keeps updating as facts land — it said pending where things were undecided before the fork, and says so again if anything reopens.