"Do the Knots nodes matter?"

Some are saying it doesn't matter that 9% of bitcoin nodes are running Knots now because they probably don't have any economic weight. E.g. did Coinbase announce they are switching? Or some big mining pool? No.

But they do matter. Here's why.

There's not a good way to know how much economic weight the Knots users actually have. It's easy to assume something like "Well, major infrastructure providers haven't said they are switching to Knots, so all of these people must just be raspberry pi users LARPing as if they matter."

But (1) it's possible for someone major to switch without announcing it (2) it's possible that a lot of these Knots users run small businesses, and if so, that can quickly add up to a significant amount of economic weight.

I don't think there's a good way to know but there's another factor to consider: the Knots people are running a couple thousand nodes, and even if they only represent 10% of the people upset with Core, that means tens of thousands of people are now part of a vocal minority.

If this minority proves to be persistent, people who *do* have economic weight will be economically incentivized to serve that community and advertise to them, and part of their messaging could be "Look, we're running Knots too! Support us by buying our shirts & hats & VPSs & whatnot!"

So even if the majority of these people *are* LARPers, and even if their hobby nodes are meaningless by themselves, it can result in people who do have economic weight joining that community for self-interested reasons -- and then suddenly there *is* economic weight in that community.