Is Bitcoin Core 'Woke?' Some Knots Proponents Think So

The technical tug-of-war between two key factions in the Bitcoin community has now degenerated into identity politics.

‘Woke’ or ‘Based?’ Knots and Core Debate Diverging Ideologies

What was once an obscure phrase used as early as the 1930s by African Americans to describe awareness of racism has now become a pejorative term thrown around by conservatives to mock blue-haired Antifa activists. Interestingly, proponents of Bitcoin Knots have also begun using the term, tauntingly of course, to refer to Bitcoin Core advocates.

To be clear, “woke” has become ubiquitous. The adjective was added to prestigious English dictionaries such as Oxford and Merriam-Webster in 2017. The word is now somewhat amorphous and generally understood as a catch-all term for liberal values and ideology. But how did a largely libertarian Bitcoin faction end up getting lumped in with the likes of Bernie Sanders and Dylan Mulvaney?

“The Woke Mind Virus has infiltrated Bitcoin Core,” wrote one Knots proponent on X. “Stay vigilant. Run Knots. Point hash at Ocean using DATUM. Sound Money remains Bitcoin’s Dominant Strategy. Filters up.”

(Jimmy Song is a longtime Bitcoin developer and author of five books.) But is the mudslinging between Knots and Core really the product of a “left-right divide” as veteran Bitcoin developer and author Jimmy Song recently posited in a short video on X? Or are the accusations of wokeness simply disingenuous smears designed to inflict maximum reputational damage to Core proponents?

“The accusations are getting increasingly personal and the tactics being used, more political,” Song observes. “I suspect this is due to the political leanings of the two sides.”

How It All Started

The first half of Song’s thesis is indeed correct, but the second half, perhaps not so much. The current Knots versus Core debate started in early 2023 after the launch of the Ordinals protocol. Ordinals is a clever way of exploiting upgrades made to Bitcoin’s software in 2017 and 2021 that now allow non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to be embedded in the blockchain. Ordinals NFTs are also known as “inscriptions.”

“Inscriptions are like NFTs, but are true digital artifacts: decentralized, immutable, always on-chain, and native to Bitcoin,” wrote Ordinals creator Casey Rodarmor.

Enter Luke Dashjr, a longtime Bitcoin developer who forked the Core client several years ago, made small changes to it, and dubbed the new implementation Bitcoin Knots. When Ordinals made headlines in 2023, it caused a community-wide uproar, but few were as vehemently opposed to NFTs on Bitcoin as Dashjr. He called Ordinals an “attack” on Bitcoin and spun up a “spam filter” to block transactions containing inscriptions.

(Former Bitcoin Core contributor and creator of Bitcoin Knots, Luke Dashjr, is front and center in the Knots versus Core debate.) But things escalated earlier this year when Bitcoin Core developers announced an upcoming upgrade to increase the size of a small 80-byte metadata field that contains what’s called an OP_RETURN output. The change will be included in version thirty of Bitcoin Core and will balloon the field to 100KB by default, with an option to expand it to 4MB. Dashjr argues that such a dramatic increase will trigger a surge in NFTs and the proliferation of child sex abuse material (CSAM).

“From 2010 until 2022, Bitcoin used spam filters to keep garbage out of the chain,” Dashjr wrote. “In 2022, the ‘Inscription’ exploit was discovered, and we now have 2 full years of its damage to observe.”

Then, what was a technical and philosophical debate about Bitcoin accommodating non-financial transactions suddenly turned political, perhaps even spiritual, causing Song to float his theory of a left and right divide.

“The bulk of developers pushing this change are based in New York with Chaincode Labs and in San Francisco with Spiral and Localhost,” Song explains. All three organizations focus on Bitcoin research and development and provide grants to Bitcoin Core contributors. Both New York and especially San Francisco are considered liberal strongholds. “The bulk of the opposition are based in places that are more right leaning like Texas and Florida,” Song adds.

Interestingly, Spiral has strong ties with Bitcoin technology firm Block, run by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Block’s Dorsey led the $6.2 million seed round for Dashjr’s mining startup Ocean.

How We Got to Woke

The wokeness accusation appears to reference Core’s insistence to increase the metadata size regardless of widespread opposition. Song and others refer to it as distributed authoritarianism, where Core shoves its updates down everyone’s throats and simply ignores dissenting voices. Others point to Ava Chow (formerly Andrew Chow), Core’s transgender maintainer, and Gloria Zhao, Chow’s colleague and the first female Bitcoin Core maintainer as proof of a focus on diversity and inclusion. In the open-source community, maintainers are key figures who review and approve changes to software suggested by other contributors.

“For Core there’s more concern for inclusiveness and a fear of external systems such as out of band payments, and a framing of the issue as censorship-related, which are more left coded,” Song explains. “For the opposition, there’s concern for monetary primacy, self-sovereignty, and reputational risk, which are more right coded.”

Others have chimed in on Song’s thesis with varying levels of agreement and dissent. Jameson Lopp, co-founder and chief security officer at Bitcoin custody firm Casa, disagrees with Song and ironically sees the Knots crowd as the authoritarian camp. “We shall never surrender to moralizing authoritarians!” Lopp recently wrote.

Another longtime Core supporter, Adam Back, CEO and co-founder of Bitcoin infrastructure firm Blockstream, found Song’s analysis amusing. Back is also the British computer scientist who invented Hashcash in 1997. Hashcash is a proof-of-work algorithm that Satoshi Nakamoto incorporated into the Bitcoin protocol. “Delete this one @jimmysong,” Back wrote in reaction to Song’s comments. “If you think I’m ‘left leaning’ LMFAO.”

In the final analysis, it’s not clear who’s woke and who’s conservative between the Core and Knots camps. It’s not even clear if the term woke is the best word to describe either faction. But what’s apparent is that the two sides have gone beyond a mere technical tussle into the realm of morality, ethics, and emotions.

“There’s a debate behind the debate,” Song opined. “And the issue is a flashpoint of a bigger conflict.”

But is that “bigger conflict” neatly organized around a left-right divide? Probably not. “I think ultimately Bitcoin is apolitical money,” Back said in a recent Forbes interview. “People from all across the spectrum, from different cultures or political leanings will all be buying bitcoin.”