This is what you’re aligning with when you run Core. Neutrality isn’t some law of nature. It only sounds noble. In practice, it’s just an excuse to let junk flood Bitcoin while pretending nothing can be done. But it can be done — in code. Knots is already doing it, just not under the banner of “neutrality.” And then people wonder why the timechain keeps getting filled with VC-funded garbage. Don’t forget the ethos. Don’t forget what Satoshi did. Bitcoin wasn’t born “neutral.” It was born as a weapon — separating money from state. Satoshi gave us this in 2009, right after the 2008 financial crash. That was the mission. That’s not neutrality, that’s resistance. The reference implementation does not need to be neutral. Scrap that narrative. If the foundation is “neutral,” then every exploit gets debated forever: what’s spam, what’s not, round and round — until Bitcoin becomes Ethereum 2.0, filled with VC-funded JPEGs, zk-snark experiments, and dapp nonsense instead of sound money. Knots is simple if you think about it: strict and opinionated. It does its best to keep Bitcoin what it was built for — money transfer, BTC transfer, value transfer. Everything else is spam. Shocking, right? Exploits that abuse Taproot? Knots doesn’t pass them on — they’re cut at the relay. Core never will, because they’re committed to neutrality theater and endless re-litigation of “what is spam.” If the mission is separation of money and state, then Bitcoin cannot afford neutrality-as-policy. Neutrality sounds noble, but it’s the fastest path to dilution. An opinionated reference client that protects Bitcoin’s monetary use case is the only way it survives. So yes, the uncomfortable truth is that Knots is not neutral — it’s opinionated. Be comfortable with that and vote with your node. And no, if you keep running older versions of Core, it means you’re still allowing ordinals and inscriptions (among many others) to be relayed — which helps that VC-funded junk get mined into the timechain. Knots v29 has those additional filters. If at the very least you want to ossify, ossify with Knots v29. I’m not personally into ossification. I’m with Luke (and even most Core devs) that we shouldn’t ossify yet — not until we’ve had the chance to build fully trustless L2 solutions with covenants and other primitives. These need years of peer review and testing before they can be standardized. But let’s be honest: building rough consensus for anything like that feels almost impossible now, thanks to Core’s Taproot update that opened the door to all this junk in the first place. At least with Knots, when you install it, you know with full consciousness what you’re running: it’s not neutral, it’s hostile to spam, it has one purpose — to separate money from state. It respects the ethos and doesn’t hide under the banner of neutrality. If Knots is wrong for doing that, then it won’t get adopted. But if you choose to run it with clear intent — not out of tribalism or FUD — then Bitcoin becomes what it was meant to be, as Satoshi intended, dictated by the node runners who keep it decentralized. At the end of the day, every version of Knots will always be an optional upgrade. Bitcoiners decide what Bitcoin becomes. #bitcoin View quoted note →