Let’s take a look at two things that Bitcoin Knots users claim to be supporters and champions in their crusade against Bitcoin Core:
- Mining decentralization
- The use of bitcoins as money
They claim to fight for mining decentralization, with the ocean mining swimming pool that resisted as a main example of this. The Ocean data protocol is apparently designed to further for mining, in particular the process of building the actual model that decides which transactions go to a block.
They also claim to fight for the use of Bitcoin as a monetary network, or a network that facilitates Bitcoin transmission in economic transactions, guaranteeing safety for such transactions.
These are both incredibly important goals. The remaining decentralized remaining Bitcoin network is absolutely fundamental to maintain its resistance to censorship. A clear majority of miners duty exist and operate in a free state from the possibility of coercion from the state (or from any other part) to engage in censorship. Without existing in this state, a simple majority of miners forced in such a way would be able to perpetually prevent any transaction from confirming in the blockchain, completely undermining the proposal for Bitcoin’s value.
Even the downsizing of Bitcoin use as money is incredibly important. The only mechanisms to transition with Bitcoin in a censorship resistant are those that are truly anchored to the blockchain itself in a way in which the end user can apply their ownership of their current Bitcoin balance.
Both of these things are absolutely necessary for Bitcoin to contribute significantly to any positive change in the world.
So let’s take a look at what they claim to represent compared to what they are really doing.
Actions against words
So, first, the developers worked on a protocol called Stratum V2, a replacement of the current Statum V1 protocol used to interact with the extraction pool. This was a huge project, all completely open source, to allow individual miners to select transactions included in the blocks themselves compared to the pool operator (the pool still controls payments).
The new Block Mining Proto platform supports Statum V2, Braiins Pool and DMnd Pool have an integrated support.
What did Ocean do (managed by the greatest supporters of the knots) to support Statum V2? Nothing. They created their owner alternative data (they committed themselves to Open Source all in the future but have not yet done so). In both solutions, the pool operator is able to refuse the blocks proposed by individual miners, which would leave the miner who continues to work for which they are not paid. Statum V2 immediately supports the transition to another pool in this case to ensure that the miner continues to be paid, the ocean does not. It is simply a predefined setting for solomation.
Since it is not even open yet, no other pool can adopt it. It is essentially a blockage of the supplier for Ocean Pool, which can still refuse any model that a miner proposes, without any way to trivially give up if a miner’s blocking model is rejected and switch to another swimming pool.
Finally, the practice of filtering transactions slows down the propagation of blocks through the network. When a miner finds a block, they do not transmit the entire block, they transmit the header with a “list” compressed of all transactions in it for a node to reconstruct and check the block with transactions in their memo. When the nodes do not have those transactions, it takes more time to recover them from peers, validate the block and transmit it forward.
This hurts the smaller miners disproportionately. If a large swimming pool has an orphan block for this, that is, another miner finds a block before the other spreads through the net, that larger miner has a very high possibility of finding the next block on their orphan, thus “saving” it to be included in the blockchain.
Smaller miners do not have those high probability of finding the next block in this situation. This disadvantages them, making the transactions paid higher something that could actually lose money, unlike the bigger miners who probably find the next block and do not have their first orphan.
In many ways the supporters of the ocean (and nodes) are actively damage Mining decentralization while proclaiming defenders of it.
Now let’s take a look at the use of Bitcoin as money. Ephemeral anchors are an optimization to make the function of lightning in a more efficient way, for a deeper explanation of them you can read this, but the important point is that they allow lightning users to be much more efficient with the commissions they pay to close the channel channels.
The latest version of knots by default filters these transactions and will not transmit them through the network. When a lightning user has to close not cooperatively, he is doing it to protect their funds. The lightning implementations are all in different phases of shift to use. Nodes actively tries to prevent these transactions forwarded to miners.
How does this help to make the use of bitcoins like money? Once again, just like with mining decentralization, they act in a complete opposite way of what they say. Citrea is another example, a Bitcoin 2 level designed to reduce financial transactions. The OP_return Knots filter will not transmit the necessary transactions to enforce the correct functioning of level 2.
What they do matters, not what they say
The supporters of the knots proclaim Bitcoin defenders, here to make sure that a decentralized money resistant to censorship remains. But their actions push towards the exact opposite objective.
The things they do to “defend” mining decentralization actually create dynamics worsens its centralization.
During the proclamation of Bitcoin is money and defending its use as this main objective, the software that release and perform Actively threatens more levels 2 whose whole is to resize the use of bitcoin as money.
They are literally fully engaged in a campaign with the final goal of preventing some types of bitcoin transactions from being carried out, while the Bitcoin defenders are proclaimed.
At the end of the day, this is an open network and people can perform any software that want to interact with that open network. This is a critical and important aspect of Bitcoin. It’s not about software, these are people.
These are the declared objectives, the declared values of people in this space, being the exact opposite of the actions in which they commit themselves. I hope the bitcoiners are intelligent enough to see in the end the newspaper Orwellian who dominated the entire dispute around Bitcoin Core and Knots in recent years.
“The party told you to refuse the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final and more essential command.”