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CitizenPedro

If you're out of the loop like me, this is a summary of the Bitcoin Core vs Bitcoin Knots debate.

Please feel free to add to it to make sure it's right or not.

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## Introduction

The current debate in Bitcoin is often framed as **Bitcoin Core vs. Bitcoin Knots**, but that’s not the real issue.

At its core, the controversy is about **Ordinals vs. monetary-only Bitcoin**:

- Should Bitcoin remain a **neutral, general-purpose ledger** where people can inscribe art, tokens, and other data?

- Or should Bitcoin be kept **lean and focused strictly on monetary transactions**, preserving block space for payments and settlements?

⚔️ The Ordinals Debate in Bitcoin

What Ordinals are

A protocol that numbers individual sats and lets people inscribe arbitrary data (images, text, tokens) into Bitcoin blocks via SegWit/Taproot.

Enables Bitcoin-native NFTs, meme coins, and permanent data storage.

## The Supporters’ View

Innovation & new use cases: Bitcoin isn’t just money, it can be a foundation for art, collectibles, and tokenization.

Miner revenue boost: High Ordinals activity drives up transaction fees, which helps secure Bitcoin as block subsidies shrink.

Permissionless ethos: Bitcoin is supposed to be neutral — anyone should be free to use it without gatekeeping.

The Critics’ View (e.g. Luke Dashjr / Bitcoin Knots)

Spam & bloat: Inscriptions fill blocks with non-financial data, raising fees for ordinary payments.

Against Bitcoin’s purpose: The base layer should prioritize financial transactions, not NFTs or memes.

Centralization risks: Larger blocks → bigger storage/processing requirements → fewer people can run nodes.

Policy response: Bitcoin Knots enforces stricter relay rules (e.g. 42-byte OP_RETURN) and filters some inscription transactions.

## The Broader Tension

Bitcoin Core v30 (coming 2025) will loosen limits, making inscriptions easier.

Bitcoin Knots is rising in popularity (~18% of nodes) as a counterweight, keeping “anti-spam” defaults.

This creates a philosophical and technical split:

Bitcoin as neutral, general-purpose ledger (pro-Ordinals).

Bitcoin as lean, monetary-only system (anti-Ordinals).

✅ In one line:

The Ordinals debate is really about what Bitcoin should be:

A neutral, permissionless base layer for all kinds of data and innovation, or

A strictly monetary network optimized only for peer-to-peer cash and settlement.

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Is this correct? Which side of the conversation are you on?

#asknostr

Block Art Transmitted By Relays 3mo ago 💬 3

This is not correct. All core developers are focused on payments. If there is a narrative out there that "Bitcoin Core supports inscriptions and Knots doesn't" that is wildly disingenuous.

The most important mistake specifically in your post is that looser op return limits mean there will be more inscriptions on chain. Inscriptions are very happy living in witness data already where they have been for years. It is much cheaper to store data there.

The goal of the v30 policy change is to match the behavior we *already observe* in miners, the consensus engine. This improves block propagation, fee estimation, and reduces the advantage larger miners have over smaller miners. In a word: decentralization.

Here's some more posts:

https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/addressing-community-concerns-and-objections-regarding-my-recent-proposal-to-relax-bitcoin-cores-standardness-limits-on-op-return-outputs/1697

https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/a-comprehensive-op-return-limits-q-a-resource-to-combat-misinformation/1689

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Discussion

CitizenPedro 3mo ago 💬 2

But wait, you really can't see how Antoine is arguing for Citrea and stuff like this in your post?

Happy to go on audio and record it to share resolution with the world. I don't know enough about this, but I do think Bitcoin Core 30 is more experimental than Knots.

Block Art Transmitted By Relays 3mo ago 💬 1

Citrea, ARK, BitVM -- they are monetary bitcoin protocols like lightning. Its payments it's not jpegs

CitizenPedro 3mo ago

ChatGPT doesn't think this is true though.

"Lightning is purely about payments — off-chain channels using Bitcoin scripts, nothing more.

Citrea is a zk-rollup with its own execution environment. It can do payments, but its design is much broader: it enables smart contracts, dApps, NFTs, DeFi — basically Ethereum-like functionality anchored to Bitcoin. That’s way beyond Lightning.

ARK is a proposal for off-chain transaction pools using service providers — also payment-focused, but with different tradeoffs than Lightning (custodial-ish but scalable).

BitVM is an experimental framework for general-purpose computation verified on Bitcoin. Again, you can build monetary protocols on top, but its scope is computations, not just payments.

So lumping them all together as “monetary protocols like Lightning” oversimplifies things.

Lightning = yes, strictly monetary.

ARK = also monetary (alternative to Lightning).

BitVM and Citrea = general-purpose computation layers, not limited to payments.

And importantly — none of these are “jpegs” like Ordinals. That’s true. But to be precise, Citrea and BitVM are much closer to Ethereum-style smart contract layers than to Lightning’s payment channels."

Block Art Transmitted By Relays 3mo ago 💬 1

Whoa wait "experimental"? In what way? Just because of this policy change? If anything the code changes applied to core have at least 10-100x more testing and review than knots.

CitizenPedro 3mo ago

https://citrea.xyz/

Bitcoin's First ZK Rollup

Citrea is fully EVM compatible, enabling all the EVM developers to easily build on Bitcoin. Citrea implements a Type 2 zkEVM that makes the full VM implementation provable.

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Have you really looked into these things?

Bitcoin as a monetary network all the way. I'm with Luke and monetary conservatism on this. Keep all of this stuff out of Bitcoin.

You can do this everywhere else.

Ronin 3mo ago 💬 1

That alone is already stupid, miners can include/exclude whatever they want, on one side you have Mara doing out of band txs, on the other you have ocean not including data, did they follow what we were already seeing with ocean? no, they went with miners Out Of Band services, wich means they go around what the network wants. Core should be represented what we(nodes) as a network desire, not miners, i thought that lesson was already learned from the blocksize wars.

CitizenPedro 3mo ago

Exactly. This is a fundamental point right here.

And this seems to be the biggest argument of the "other" side, in other words, "you can't do anything about it, etc".

Bitcoin is a monetary network and it should be kept that way.

Skyler Byrden ⚡️BIP 110 ⚡️UASF 3mo ago

The DOT doesn’t change the speed limit to match the behavior we *already observe* in drivers.

They install calming measures and speed cameras.