Allegedly, 19% of the bitcoin network is now running knots
However, I think I have detected evidence of a sybil attack designed to inflate the number of Knots users
I have annoted part of the "historical nodes" chart available at http://coin.dance/nodes/all
Based on this, I suspect the *real* percentage of Knots usage (subtracting probably sybils) is about 12.3% of the total network -- ~2,710 nodes out of 21,950 nodes.
Still a big deal, but not as big as the current numbers seem to suggest
This isn't proof. If there were IP addresses it would help determine if they were all cloned at data centres farms.
I have better proof. A lot of new people have started running nodes because of this situation. If you listen or read the comments on Bitcoin University and This week in Bitcoin (for example) you'll see a huge amount of new users every week.
I believe there are new node runners due to this drama. I think I have talked to some of them and I think their existence is good for bitcoin. But I don't think there are so many of them as to account for the spike we see in the charts. The same dynamics that produce more Knots users ought to produce fewer Core users, and we saw that early on, but since June it has largely stopped. The pattern on the charts can be *partly* attributed to new users choosing Knots, and I think that is great, but I think most of it it is likely attributable to someone spinning up fake Knots nodes without the ability to make the Core node count fall.
There is certainly a mix of both. I've seen knots supporters encouraging people to spin up cloud based knots nodes as well as newcomers spinning up Start9 personal nodes
