That argument sounds clever, but it’s misleading.

Yes, Knots inherits nearly all of its codebase from Bitcoin Core — but that’s exactly the point. The Core repo has hundreds of eyes on it, reviewing, testing, arguing, and reaching rough consensus on what goes in. Knots, on the other hand, introduces changes that bypass that process — changes like filters, which do affect behavior, especially in the context of contentious features.

So if someone adds controversial filtering logic to Core’s codebase and publishes it as Knots, the number of people maintaining that fork doesn’t magically become “Core + 1” : it becomes 1 maintainer making unilateral decisions on top of a collectively maintained base. That’s a huge difference.

This isn’t about copy-pasting code — it’s about who decides what changes go in, and whether those changes are vetted by the broader dev ecosystem. If Knots introduces features that don’t exist in Core, and those features are maintained by a single person, then yes that feature has one maintainer. That’s not a diss, it’s a structural reality.

If someone wants to promote Knots, they should own that - not blur the lines with Core to boost its credibility.