Hahah, you can have the sats back, brother! Definitely been there before 🤣

You definitely should have a choice in which node software you run. I’m very pro free market first.

But knots can’t save your node from downloading or reading any data once it makes its way into a block. (Same goes for core). You have to accept the block if you want your node to be in sync with the rest of the network.

If you want to reject all spam once and for all you’ll have to hard fork the blockchain every time some dev somewhere figures out a new way to inscribe data (which there are theoretically infinite!).

But here is the beauty of op_return, it was explicitly introduced to make non-financial data deletable after it’s validated when you run a pruned node.

(Before op_return people would inscribe data into the utxo set and every node would be forced to hold non-financial data forever, even pruned nodes!)

Every core or knots user has the right and ability to delete op_return data whenever they want.

But that truth isn’t sexy or fun to talk about. Influencers are constantly lying and blowing things out of proportion for extra clicks and views.