Wiki / Forks / Bitcoin Knots

Bitcoin Knots

From the Bitcoin Takeover Wiki · ✓ 7 sources · 3 podcast anchors · built 2026-11-13

Luke Dashjr's derivative of Bitcoin Core: the long-running alternative client that became the base of the 2025–26 anti-spam movement and of the BIP-110 split.

◆ Takeover vieweditorial · opinion, labelled

The wiki's angle: Knots spent a decade as a niche client and then became a political party. Bitcoin Takeover's BLAKE2b essay calls it the home of the opposition to Core's 2025 OP_RETURN change.[5]

Contents

  1. What it is
  2. Policy differences
  3. Politics and BIP-110
  4. Versions
  5. Heard on Bitcoin Takeover
  6. References

What it is

The Bitcoin Wiki describes Knots, formerly Bitcoin LJR and Bitcoin Next-Test, as a derivative of Bitcoin Core primarily maintained by Luke Dashjr, with all of Core's functionality and more[1]. The project's website says that only Luke Dashjr, as lead maintainer, may post to its announcement mailing list[2]. The current GitHub repository was created on 25 February 2016[3].

Policy differences

The Bitcoin Wiki's 2018 feature list includes full replace-by-fee enabled by default from version 0.16, a blockmaxsize option, coin-age priority and a bytespersigopstrict option “to detect certain kinds of spam”[1]. On S16 E56 Super Testnet argued that because Knots nodes do not relay filtered transactions, they “use objectively less bandwidth than Bitcoin Core” for that traffic[4].

Politics and BIP-110

Bitcoin Takeover's BLAKE2b essay describes Knots, “the alternative client Luke Dashjr has maintained for over a decade”, as the home of the opposition after Bitcoin Core loosened its OP_RETURN policy in 2025[5]. Knots nodes enforcing BIP-110 began rejecting non-signalling blocks at height 961,632 on 8 August 2026, which split them from Bitcoin; see Bitcoin BLAKE2b[5]. On S17 E17 Vlad discussed the possibility of that Knots/BIP-110 fork before it happened[6].

Versions

On 13 November 2026 the website offered version 29.5.knots20260508 for macOS, Windows and Linux[2]. The BLAKE2b chain's infobox lists Bitcoin Knots 29.4.1.knots20260508 as its client[5].

Heard on Bitcoin Takeover

Citing Murch's count of changed lines, Michael Tidwell said on S16 E42 (September 2025) that “there's more lines of code that are different between Knots and Core than there were total lines in the original implementation of Bitcoin”.[7]

References

  1. secondaryBitcoin Wiki, “Bitcoin Knots” (revision 65116, March 2018) [archived]
  2. primaryBitcoin Knots official website, bitcoinknots.org (read 13 Nov 2026) [archived]
  3. primaryGitHub, bitcoinknots/bitcoin repository metadata (created 25 Feb 2016) [archived]
  4. episodeS16 E56: Super Testnet on Knots nodes and bandwidth▶ listen at 36:44timestamp transcript-derived, pending a listen [archived]
  5. btkBitcoin BLAKE2b: The Fork That Fired the Miners (BTCTKVR: Forks!) [archived]
  6. episodeS17 E17: Lukas Hozda on BIP-110 — Vlad on a possible Knots/BIP-110 fork▶ listen at 1:18:41timestamp transcript-derived, pending a listen [archived]
  7. episodeS16 E42: Michael Tidwell on the size of the Knots diff▶ listen at 40:35timestamp transcript-derived, pending a listen [archived]

Related

Luke Dashjr
Bitcoin Knots maintainer; central figure of BIP-110 and the 2026 BLAKE2b fork.
Bitcoin BLAKE2b (XBT / BTCB2)
The 2026 fork that grew out of Luke Dashjr's BIP-110 anti-spam soft fork and replaced SHA-256d with BLAKE2b. S
Bitcoin
The original chain. Every UTXO fork in this wiki shares its history up to a split block.
Drivechains (BIP-300/301)
Sidechains whose two-way peg is secured by miners (BIP-300) with blind merged mining (BIP-301).
Categories: Forks · Fork lineage
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