Yes, a menace to Core. We are not supposed to get consensus dictated by fiat. We are supposed to find emergent consensus.

Every new version of Core is "another" client as much as Knots or any other alternative.

And I am not evaluating Knots on its merits or lack thereof. I just want competition and debate of ideas and their implementation (clients / software).

Other ideas or clients being a "menace" — that's what a fiat statist would say ("This is dangerous to our democracy.").

I have some patches on my Bitcoin Core node that I compile myself. The patches aren't open source; they are mine.

The last time a lot of people were talking about alternate implementations was when there was that bug in btcd that caused a bunch of LND nodes to go down. I remember some people reacting strongly to it, going so far as to say: we need to match Bitcoin Core even down to the bugs.

I run Bitcoin Core and think it's an excellent project. By far the most reviewed node implementation, and I think the way they think about transaction relay is incredibly thoughtful. But I'd love to live in a world where we have more implementations. Bitcoin would certainly be a stronger project if we had two or three well-reviewed node implementations to choose from.

If Bitcoin Core shipped a bug that allowed inflation or some kind of fork, and some of these other nodes (Knots, Libbitcoin, btcd) didn't have that bug, which chain would be the "real" bitcoin?

I generally agree, at least until we get a shared consensus library. Though, it's nice that people are motivated to run nodes at all, even if the motivations are ... weird. And, I think Luke is smart enough to not mess with consensus code for the time being ... even if I can see him and his team continue to be uncaring, using absolute speech, shouting their suspicions and beliefs as facts, causing normies to misunderstand the situation.

Yeah this OP_Return flame ware completely broke Kratter’s brain. Knots doesn’t have many maintainers I never understood how running to knots was a legitimate solution

“I don’t believe a second, compatible implementation of Bitcoin will ever be a good idea. So much of the design depends on all nodes getting exactly identical results in lockstep that a second implementation would be a menace to the network. The MIT license is compatible with all other licenses and commercial uses, so there is no need to rewrite it from a licensing standpoint.” — Satoshi Nakamoto

It's fascinating how much fear alternative clients trigger, when in theory Bitcoin should welcome diversity, that's part of its resilience. If Core is truly superior, it shouldn't need gatekeeping or fearmongering to maintain its dominance.

The idea that “other clients are a menace” feels more like a symptom of centralization anxiety. Shouldn’t a decentralized system tolerate even thrive on multiple clients implementing the same consensus rules? If Knots or btcd fork, that says more about our lack of clear specs than it does about the client.

The real menace is intellectual stagnation. If we lose debate, experimentation, and redundancy, we lose Bitcoin’s antifragility.

I'd like to quote Satoshi here, “If you don’t believe me or don’t get it, I don’t have time to try to convince you.”

I don't think another client is radically a menace; diversity of ideas and proposals should be desirable in a protocol where consensus is what matters and decides which idea or proposal is the best.