A massive surge in Bitcoin Knots nodes hints at a brewing civil war in Bitcoin. If tensions escalate, the price could be the first casualty. Bitcoin Knots, first released by developer Luke Dashjr in the early 2010s, has long offered a more configurable and policy-agnostic alternative to Core. Currently, most nodes use the Bitcoin Core client to support the Bitcoin network. However, Bitcoin Knots has grown an impressive 638% since the start of the year, jumping from only 394 nodes to 2,909 nodes as of June 19. This massive growth rate started to see significant upticks in May and now makes up 13.24% of all the nodes supporting the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin Knots’ recent popularity spike suggests that a non-trivial share of Bitcoin’s infrastructure operators no longer trust Core to define Bitcoin’s limits unilaterally. Read more