A fresh round of sparring between Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots over “arbitrary data” and policy defaults is ricocheting across X, but the argument’s bones are older than many remember. As Bitcoin developer Peter Todd put it on Sunday, “Good read. tl;dr: everything that has been said about Core vs Knots has already been said almost 15 years ago.”

The 2010 Fight Over Bitcoin’s Soul That Never Ended

The historical through-line runs straight back to December 2010, when Satoshi Nakamoto shipped Bitcoin version 0.3.18. That release quietly introduced an “IsStandard()” relay and mining policy to “only include known transaction types,” a defensive move designed to reduce attack surface from exotic scripts. Satoshi’s own release note summarized the change tersely: “IsStandard() check to only in

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