🍴 That’s not a fork

This week on Supply Shock, Pete Rizzo chats with Mike Schmidt (Brink exec director; Bitcoin Optech co-author) about Core vs. Knots, policy vs. protocol, and who actually sets Bitcoin’s defaults.

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Schmidt walked Rizzo through why Core merged the OP_RETURN / data-carrier bump: it’s harm-reduction to steer small payloads into the “garbage bin” instead of fake pubkeys that bloat the UTXO set. Inscriptions weren’t the target; incentive hygiene was.

And Bitcoin users should run whatever node client they want, they should just know the trade-offs.

Still, a single node’s impact is mostly symbolic. But many operators are “sending a message that Bitcoin is money and spam is not welcome,” as Schmidt put it. 

More than 21% of all discoverable nodes are running Knots right now (5,154 out of 23,988), up from around 14% three months ago.

So much of the debate over spam filtering has played out on X while we all wait to see what happens after Bitcoin Core v30 drops sometime this month.

“Are we merging things based on how loud you are on Twitter? Is this going to be a democracy? Are we going to be able to do controversial but correct things in the future?” Schmidt wondered on the pod.

Pragmatically, he sees emerging forks staying consensus-compatible (helped by libbitcoinkernel work) while policy diversifies. 

Critique Core, Schmidt says — but on facts, not vibes. And yes, devs need to communicate better.

Full episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and X.

• $1.2 billion flowed into US bitcoin ETFs on Monday — the most in a single day since November 2024, per Blockworks’ Ben Strack.

• BTC/USD has slipped more than 3% below yesterday’s all-time high of $126,060. Current price: $121,860.

• Rookie numbers: Morgan Stanley reportedly advises up to 4% portfolio allocation to bitcoin.