Paul Lamb has started a new version of Knots bringing in the Knots patches into version 31 of Bitcoin Core, for those continuing with Bitcoin SHA256 nodes who don’t want to run Bitcoin Core from the traitor developers who blew open OP_RETURN while moving to prevent users from being able to limit it. Paul lists this as a pre-release test build you run at your own risk which shouldn’t be used for mining or merchant applications. I don’t run Start9 or Umbrel, so I cloned it from Github and compiled it myself which I do with all my crypto nodes, e.g. Bitcoin Blake2B, Monero… To test, I moved my $500 balance from my Coldcard Q hardware wallet to Wasabi Wallet for a coinjoin, which has completed returning the privatized funds back to the Coldcard Q (my Coldcard posts). Consequently, I’ll test it for a few days before upgrading Electrs which requires the newer version of Bitcoin Core. And I set my Bitcoin node to not include any OP_RETURN SPAM transactions in my mempool which drastically limits my bandwidth usage and what transactions I relay, and that’s working perfectly with Paul’s version. So even though Luke has abandoned us on the SHA256 chain, it looks like we’ll have a path forward thanks to Paul.
Consequently, the BLAKE2B chain development though progressing, doesn’t look that spectacular, valued at about $300 last I saw. And wallet support looks a bit sketchy other than Paul’s conversion of Sparrow Wallet, and it doesn’t look like commercial support is anywhere near close, as I’m looking for Trezor Suite to add it and enable you to split out the coins from SHA256. Unless governments and their controlled megacorps in the Bitcoin space move to limit transactions or really corrupt the protocol of Bitcoin, will BLAKE2B ever really go anywhere? And value is still with Bitcoin SHA256 which has commercial adoption and can be used for payments. It’s possible the existence of Bitcoin BLAKE2B might be enough to make governments with their captured megacorp exchanges and miners hesitate in going too far with turning Bitcoin into Ethereum for fear people will dump it and move over to BLAKE2B or another cryptocurrency, as an awful lot of wealth could be wiped out. So the chess game is on while we watch and wait.
https://paulscode.com/t/knots-sha256-version-knots31-1-knots-sha256-20261018-released/1358
I have finally gotten my Core > Knots transmogrification process ironed out, robust against attack, and redundant. I’ve run version 31.1 through, and shipped my first release (knots31.1.knots-sha256.20261018). Please read through the release notes and let me know if you spot any problems or think that something should be tweaked. I tried to be as faithful as possible to the process that Luke was doing before the hard-fork, but it is likely that I’ve overlooked something. This will be the foundation for my Safe Nodes project, so I want it to be as solid as possible.
The Start9 apps are available on my custom registry, and Umbrel apps are available on my community app store.
On Umbrel, the simplest way to switch to my version is to uninstall the pre-rdts version of Knots (or Core if you switched to it) and then install my version. This will repeat the IBD, though, so if you want to avoid that, here is the process:
- Start Knots (SHA256)
- Wait a couple of minutes
- Stop Knots (SHA256)
- Stop Bitcoin Knots
- SSH into your umbrel:
ssh umbrel@umbrel.local
- Run the following commands:
OLD=/home/umbrel/umbrel/app-data/bitcoin-knots/data/bitcoin
NEW=/home/umbrel/umbrel/app-data/paulscode-bitcoin-knots-sha256/data/bitcoin
sudo rm -rf $NEW/blocks $NEW/chainstate $NEW/indexes
sudo mv $OLD/blocks $OLD/chainstate $OLD/indexes $NEW/
- Start Knots (SHA256)
- Point all dependent apps to Knots (SHA256)
- Uninstall Bitcoin Knots