Bitcoin Knots

Bitcoin Knots is a derivative of Bitcoin Core maintained by a single developer, Luke Dashjr. It tracks Core's codebase closely and adds patches that reflect the maintainer's particular views on how a Bitcoin node should behave - especially around mempool policy and what transactions are considered "spam."

Two important things to understand about Knots' governance:

• It's a one-person project. Unlike Bitcoin Core, which is maintained by a rotating cast of contributors with formal review processes and broad community input, Knots reflects one developer's editorial decisions. The community doesn't dictate what goes into Knots; the maintainer does. The code is open-source and anyone can fork it, but direction sits with the maintainer.
• The added patches encode specific policy opinions. Most notably, Knots applies stricter default filtering against transaction types its maintainer considers spam (large OP_RETURN payloads, Ordinals-style inscriptions, etc.). This is a policy choice, not a neutral technical improvement, and reasonable people disagree about whether node operators should impose these filters on what they relay.

The compatibility note: Knots is consensus-compatible with Core. A Knots node sees the same chain and accepts the same blocks. The differences are in relay policy (which transactions to forward) and mempool admission (which transactions to keep), which are local node choices, not consensus rules.

For most users, Bitcoin Core is the reference implementation - the codebase with broad developer review, the most-tested validation logic, and policies that emerge from the community-review process rather than a single maintainer's preferences. It's the default for a reason, and the default this site recommends.

Knots is a legitimate option if you've thought carefully about the policy stance you're taking by running it. If you haven't - if you're just looking for a Bitcoin node - Core is the answer.