I haven’t heard the connection between knots and that story—what podcast did you hear it on?

No translation I’ve read uses the term knots though. Usually in English translation it is cords or lashes.

The people doing ‘bad things’ were money changers who were giving bad rates on currency exchange and abusing pilgrims with their control of the local money.

It’s be a cool connection to draw for sure with bitcoin because in many ways it is a corrective to the abuses of money changers.

“And he found in the temple them that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting.

And when he had made, as it were, a scourge of little cords, he drove them all out of the temple, the sheep also and the oxen, and the money of the changers he poured out, and the tables he overthrew.”