Thanks. So if people who want to put arbitrary data in the chain can submit directly to miners, why was knots made at all in opposition to this, and why do people run it? Why don't the actors subvert knots nodes and submit to miners right now as a matter of course, making the whole existence of knots meaningless?
Discussion
There are miners who run Knots and mine blocks with little or no arbitrary data storage. It’s a small minority though. If enough miners did the same, it would make it more expensive to store data on chain. There’s not much point in running a non-mining Knots node, except to show support I suppose.
To your second question, it depends on the type of transaction. You don’t even need to submit directly to miners for inscriptions, because Bitcoin Core nodes (83% of the network) relay those transactions. To subvert Core AND Knots, you can go directly to miners. They will mine non-standard transactions like large OP_RETURNs. Even Core doesn’t relay them, but they are consensus valid.
The controversy with Core 30 is that it will start relaying large OP_RETURNs by default, precisely because the filter is trivial to subvert.
Thank you. I don't mean to bother you about this, im just genuinely trying to understand, since I recently started running a node (which I don't believe is mining.. im not sure if most nodes are miners). You can feel free to ignore this reply...
But what about if 80% of nodes are running knots (a conservative version of your hypothetical scenario)? Are you saying that it wouldn't matter no matter how many Knots nodes there are, or just that it doesn't matter at this point in time? Why would people not go to miners right now? Because it's more expensive than being done through a node?
You're not mining unless you bought special hardware for it. Core and Knots don't even give you the option to mine anymore because it's so inefficient with a regular CPU/GPU.
It's hard to say. If 80% of nodes were Knots, it would be harder for data transactions to propagate. But if there's enough market demand for those transactions, wallets could prioritize sending them to the 20% of non-Knots nodes, so they'd still easily get to a miner.
As far as submitting directly to a miner, the only pool I know that offers the service is https://slipstream.mara.com/ and yes, it is currently about 2x as costly as current mempool fee rates.
Okay, so it seems like it doesn't have a real effect at the moment because of comparatively low adoption numbers. But, if it did have large adoption numbers then it would make it harder for people who want to put arbitrary data on the chain to find a party to do that and it would potentially be more expensive? As I was reading the thought came to my mind " if not cannot prevent spam to any extent, then why would people run it, and what is the opposition to it?". I also don't understand the motivation for the core changes, which sounds like it makes it possible to put more arbitrary data on the chain for the same cost, effectively making arbitrary data cheaper per unit or whatever. Do core node Runners make money based on the amount of arbitrary data put in a block?