Bitcoin Knots is a second implementation of a Bitcoin full node, and it is not a separate codebase. The project's own release description opens by defining it as "a derivative of Bitcoin Core with a collection of improvements backported from, proposed for, and sometimes maintained outside of the master git tree". The README says the same about where the work happens: development "generally takes place as part of Bitcoin Core, and is merged into Knots for each release", and a change that Core closes, or that does not suit Core, "may still be eligible for inclusion in Bitcoin Knots". Version strings follow from that, since 29.4.knots20260508 names the Core version tracked and the date of the Knots build. The code is MIT licensed, per COPYING.
Most of the difference is configuration. The published contrast for the 29.x series lists
options Core does not carry, among them rejectparasites, rejecttokens to filter Runes
transactions, maxscriptsize, datacarriercost to change the policy weight given to
data-carrying bytes, and a corepolicy option that sets the whole set back to Bitcoin
Core's defaults. Most of those are relay policy, which governs what a node passes on to its
peers rather than what it will accept in a block, a distinction covered in
the OP_RETURN relay change. The same list also
includes a "Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, implemented as a modified BIP9 temporary
deployment", which is a consensus-level difference rather than a policy one.
The site publishes binaries for Linux, macOS and Windows with OpenPGP signatures and
reproducible-build fingerprints, and names Luke Dashjr as lead maintainer. It publishes no
legal entity, and none could be established from a primary source, so structure is
recorded as Undocumented rather than guessed at.
On adoption, Coin Dance counted 5,021 Bitcoin Knots nodes among 26,454 reachable public nodes on 21 August 2026, a little under a fifth. That measure covers listening nodes only, so it is a sample of the network rather than a census of it.