Thread

Replies (83)

Those are the reasons why I did not switch to Bitcoin Knots. Mainly to the fact that this project has only one maintainer not even signing his commits. But if we go back to the subject, the OP_RETURN debate has been so heated, I simply chose to not upgrade past minor 29 until I can really observe and understand what the real implications will be.
Just a question, if I fork a project on Github and someone wants to put in a pull request, do they use my new project's Github or the original's? And if commits are put in based on those pull requests how would anyone else beside the project owner sign and push them?
↩ replying to npub1m50e...glzq
Normally you fork the target project to which you wish to make the pull request, commit it in your fork, and request the upstream maintainer to merge your exact commit. Then your exact commit (with the same byte for byte code changes and commit hash) gets added to the upstream repository, essentially wrapped in a "merge commit" by the maintainer. This preserves the integrity of the code change proposed by the original author.
🛡️
If anything Lopp says in his blog about Luke/Knots is true or valid then this makes what he and core are doing extremely irresponsible. Core is the reference Bitcoin client, not Lopp's personal vehicle for squeezing some fiat out of VC backed Citrea. Changing core to appease this one particular actor, with the unintended (or intended) consequences such a change inevitably causes, is unbelievably reckless. Especially when, according to Lopp, there is no viable alternative. View quoted note →
I always said the issue of Luke losing most of his bitcoins IS a big deal. He no longer has a financial interest in bitcoins success plus when he went to the feds to cry for help they very easily could put him on their payroll. Lord knows he needed money. And they get a mole inside Bitcoin. A very symbiotic relationship indeed. Plus Luke clearly has a bone to pick with Bitcoin community. And it is important to know that this individual is a little bit mentally unsound.
🛡️
↩ replying to npub1t04c...53m9
It was 11 years ago, he missed out on a lot of gains just like Luke. Explains his severe BDS, like wanting to get rid of the 21M supply cap, and his "I'll make any PR for money" policy. Todd and Lopp are the kind of devs that were shown the door a few years ago. It's disgusting to see people who should know better worshipping these shitcoiners.
Luke is the most different of all different breeds lol .. I like the section about how a turbo-autist, immune to peer pressure might not be the best person for managing an important open-source repo. But regarding the Knots repo management critique, imo one needs to cut Knots some serious slack, because it was basically irrelevant until a few weeks ago .. must improve over the next 1-2 years though.
This article will be a case study in a few years. It's a great example of how to take most things out of context and focus on sentimentality. They focus everything on Luke, but the problem isn't Luke, the problem is Core, and we need alternatives, there's no other way. By the way, node execution is going to get interesting. Let's come back here in five years and look back on this. View quoted note →
based on what you've wrote: Do people want him in a leadership role? Probably not (a no from me). Do people trust his work in regards to security? Probably not (a no from me). So why are people installing Bitcoin Knots and the number of them are increasing? I'd imagine it's a very simple answer: because most people are signaling that they don't want the op_return increase change, and if they have to install knots to signal that, even if most people read that post about the current leadership and maintainer of it, and have the opinion that knots maintainer is bad and they'd try to stay away from him, they'd still install knots, not because of knots, but simply because they don't agree with that single change coming in Bitcoin Core 30, let alone dealing with inscriptions. I'd imagine people would say, as a response to not use knots, is "if you don't want us to use knots, or whatever other similar node, and not continue advocating for it and increase the conversions to it, then don't move forward with this change, and never do unless there's a really good reason, which is doubtful". That's how I see things, and I'd imagine most on the non-core side with this upcoming update, from what I understood in all of this.
From Giacomo (X) : > Luke sent the FBI after his fellow Bitcoin Core contributors False statement. You provided no source to verify it, and I know the opposite to be true. >Knots is a dangerous "solo dev" project that does not have the necessary level of peer review Misleading statement, unless the same is also said about LibreRelay and Bitcoin Knobs, and much more emphasis is put on Btcd. > He became much more vitriolic toward Bitcoin Core and now makes outrageous claims that it's compromised and trying to destroy Bitcoin Qualified as your personal opinion, but logically contradicted by your own examples of him being *way* more vitriolic in the past with many (cf the Voorhes and Silk Road cases you listed, contrast them with his tolerance of libertarian claims more recently): by any metric I can think of, Luke has gotten way less vitriolic over time. In general, I'm not sure using dev political opinions to dismiss software (which is 99% of your pamphlet) is the game you want to play, in order to defend Core. Be my guest in case. > abused his position of maintainer of the Gentoo Bitcoin Core package to enable his custom blacklist rules by default This statement is contradicted by the following claim by Luke's own statement "it did not occur to me at the time that the spam filter was even included". You provided no source to verify otherwise. > There is also controversy around Ocean's Datum protocol which is a competitor to Stratum V2 Misleading statement. DATUM *will be* a competing protocol to Stratum V2, once the latter will actually realize the miner-side-template-production. I think as of now OCEAN/DATUM is literally the only case of minin-side-template-production active on any pool. Even then, it will be a competing protocol, but not competition to his pool: Luke confirmed OCEAN will support SV2 as well once it gets traction. > When you get into Luke's personal opinions on bitcoin mixing (further down) this particular decision will make more sense. [...] This is relevant to my earlier point about Knots breaking the Whirlpool mixing protocol. He doesn't care because he thinks mixing is wrong and people shouldn't do it. False statement. Luke publicly stated support for coinjoin transactions in many occasions, and you provided no source of him saying otherwise, even if you claim you do in the first part of the mention. Indeed, Knots has always been relaying *all* coinjoin tx by Whirpool. It just happened that, for no good reason that I know of to this very day, some weird type of NON-coinjoin txs by Whirpool (tx0s) contained Op_returns uselessly larger than Core's historical limit (which was still Knot's limit). > Luke appears to be a geocentrist. "By the way, the Sun really orbits the Earth, not vice-versa." Misleading statement, since it insinuates this view is as unpopular as the others listed below (monarchy, masturbation, sedevacantism, etc.), at least among scientifically literate people. It's not. This seems to me to be a honest mistake based on your own parroting of the common "midwit-science" pop-view, naively misinterpreting pre-Einstein (but actually pre-Mach) Galilean relativity. In modern General Relativity, geocentrism is *literally* just as valid as any other reference frame choice (you just adjust the curvature and/or metric). Even if Newtonian physics, geocentrism is a valid choice as long as the Earth rotates to account for centrifugal forces. > Where has a large portion of the social and technical community's time and attention been spent? I tend to agree that Luke & Co have been rather poisonous as of late. False statement, offered without evidence, but also clear logical contradiction in the context of the panphlet. As explained (and paradoxically very well illustrated by your STASI-like dossier), Luke has been significantly *less* vitriolic and controversial than ever in the recent years and months. If large portion of the social and technical community's time and attention been spent supporting or attacking the claims of somebody with very low people-skills, who was traditionally ignored by most due to his unpopular opinions and eccentric personality, that's clearly caused by something else. I have theories. Sep 23, 2025 · 5:23 PM UTC
↩ replying to Dave🐸
you are talking like we are in 2015 or something. and nothing ever happened. you can easily understand core stands for public "core devs", that have control over the repo. that are actively harming and lying about things they do that makes no logical or technical sense. just bunch of brain gymnastics to justify what they did every time. if you ever read or watched one of these - responding to a counter against their claims, you can see their bullshit. just read, watch, listen what everyone said about everything, then and go verify yourself. and be honest to yourself.
I don't like the idea of a fork .. if you want to deliver a small specific feature which you believe is good ..why not just create an add on ? Fork is about ideology .. it is NOT a feature debate !
↩ replying to hasky
You can start a distribution with specific features .. Linux has thousands of distros to change the taste and flavor or meet certain features .. all are welcome .. But if you fork the Kernel .. .. it is suddenly a new system .. splits are very hard to maintain in a large eco system .. eventually, the question boils down to " kill or be killed " .. besides it leaves the entire community torn .. Fork may be fine where tech is going to change say 90 percent and older project is just not being maintained ..or you are launching a totally new project / protocol . ..
🛡️
I know Luke well enough, no introduction needed. The popularity of Knots is, after all, a reaction to the upcoming changes in the Core v30 release. Taking your writing into account, one question still remains: how can the average Bitcoiner express their disapproval regarding Core v30?
I highly value what you have done for Bitcoin, but this time you are wrong! I would be very sorry if this unfortunate debate left you with an irreparable bitter disappointment and you became an enemy of Bitcoin, like some other prominent figures among developers in the past. Bitcoin is at its very core the right to choose for yourself. There is no excuse for taking away the right of a node operator to determine the settings of their own node.
↩ replying to Биткойн.БГ
Actually there is a logical explanation for removing useless configuration parameters, but you'll find that I am in favor of leaving them in place:
GitHub
docs: Undeprecate datacarrier and datacarriersize configuration options by bitschmidty · Pull Request #33453 · bitcoin/bitcoin
Removes the deprecation for the datacarrier and datacarriersize options by reverting commit 0b4048c from #32406 Many current Bitcoin Core users wan...
The funny part is that Knots apologists come after Loop and said this article is an ad-hominem fallacy, meaning they didn't read the article itself. The dishonesty of Luke for me was when he tried to hijack the Transifex account in order to develop Knots as a Core project, which is mentioned in the article. Run Bitcoin Core people would me my NFA but if you want to run Knots after reading this, up to you...after all, your money, your rules. View quoted note →
Your critiques of Luke's security and development practices seem legit, but your ad hominems seem uncalled for. I'd say that just like wallets, more node implementation options is better than less. Undoubtedly there will be pros and cons to each implementation but users can decide and competition makes for better products in the end. Personally, I use core for transactions but knots for mining.