Action speaks more eloquent than words

Let’s take a look at two things that Bitcoin Knots users claim to be a supporter of the Crusades against Bitcoin Core.

Mining Bitcoin usage as money

They argue that marine mining pools will be postponed as a major example of this and will fight for the decentralization of mining. Ocean’s Datum protocol is designed to further minify decentralization, particularly the actual template construction process that determines which transactions enter the block.

They also claim that Bitcoin will fight for use as a currency network. In other words, it is a network that promotes the transmission of Bitcoin in economic transactions and ensures the security of those transactions.

Both of these are extremely important goals. Bitcoin mining networks remain decentralized. It is absolutely important to maintain censorship resistance. There must be a clear majority of miners and be in states where there is no possibility of enforcement from the state (or other parties) to engage in censorship. Without being in this state, the majority of simple miners forced in such a way can permanently prevent transaction verification on the blockchain and completely undermine Bitcoin’s core value proposal.

It is also very important to scale your Bitcoin usage as money. The only mechanism to trade using Bitcoin in a censor-resistant way is a mechanism that is truly fixed in the blockchain itself in a way that allows end users to independently enforce ownership of the current balance of Bitcoin.

Both of these are absolutely necessary for Bitcoin to contribute meaningfully to positive change in the world.

So let’s take a look at what they actually do and what they’re doing.

Action vs. Words

So first, the developers are working on a protocol called Stratum V2. This is the alternative used by current Stratum V1 protocol miners to interact with mining pools. This was a large project to allow individual miners to choose the transactions contained within the block itself, as opposed to pool operators, all completely open source (the pool still controls payments).

Block’s new Proto Mining Rig supports integrated support for Stratum V2, Braiins Pool and DMND pools.

What did Ocean (run by the largest knot supporter) do to support the Stratum V2? there is nothing. They created their own unique alternative data (they promised to open source everything in the future, but have not done so yet). With either solution, pool operators can reject the proposed blocks from the individual miners. The Stratum V2 supports switching to another pool of such cases immediately, ensuring that miners continue to pay, but the ocean is not. Just solomining by default.

Considering that there is no open source yet, other pools cannot adopt it. This is essentially Ocean Pool’s vendor rockkin and can still reject the templates proposed by Minor. If a minor block template is rejected and you switch to another pool, there is no way to opt out of trivial things.

Additionally, transaction filtering practice slows down block propagation across the network. When the miner finds a block, it does not relay the entire block, so it relays the header with a compressed “list” of all transactions of nodes to rebuild and verify the block in a transaction in memory. If the node does not have these transactions, it takes time to get them from the peer, validate the block, and move forward.

This will injure the small miners disproportionately. Therefore, if the block is isolated in a large pool, that is, before another miner finds a block that spreads across the network, it is very likely that the larger miner will find the orphan’s next blockbuilding, so it will be “saved” to be included in the blockchain.

Small miners are unlikely to find the next block in this situation. This makes them a disadvantage and makes them the best fee to pay transactions that could actually lose money, as opposed to the large miners who are likely to find the next block and not orphan the first block.

In multiple ways, the ocean (and knot advocates) declared that while actively harming mining decentralization, they are defending it.

Now let’s use Bitcoin as money. Short-lived anchors are optimizations to make lightning function more efficiently. To explain this in a deeper way, you can read this, but the key point is that lightning users will be much more efficient at the fees they pay for closed channels on the chain.

The latest release of default knots filters these transactions and does not relay them across the network. If Lightning users need to approach uncooperatively, they do so to protect their funds. All implementations of lightning are in different stages of shifting to using them. The knot actively attempts to prevent these transactions that communicate to miners.

How does it help to promote the use of Bitcoin as money? Again, just like decentralising mining, they act in the exact opposite way that they say. Citrea is yet another example. This is Bitcoin Layer 2, designed to scale financial transactions. The Knots op_return filter does not relay the transactions required to perform the correct behavior of Layer 2.

What they say is important, not what they say

The knot supporters declare their advocates of Bitcoin here. But their actions push towards the opposite goal.

What they do for “champion” mining decentralization actually creates dynamics that exacerbate centralization.

Declaring Bitcoin is money, and while defending its use as such a main goal, the software they release and run actively undermine multiple Layer 2, which aims to scale Bitcoin usage as money.

They are literally fully involved in a campaign with the ultimate goal of preventing certain types of Bitcoin transactions from occurring while declaring Bitcoin advocates.

At the end of the day, this is an open network, allowing people to run the software they want to interact with that open network. That is an important and important aspect of Bitcoin. This is not about software, it’s about people.

This is about the stated goals, designated values ​​of people in this field, and the complete opposite of the actions they engage in. Bitcoiner hopes he is smart enough to finally see Orwell’s newspaper, which has dominated the entire dispute over Bitcoin core and knot over the past few years.

“The party told you to reject evidence for your eyes and ears. That was their ultimate and most important order.”