Where Does Knots' Code Actually Come From?
Bitcoin Knots is - commits ahead of Core. By filtering out merge commits, we isolated the - incremental authored commits and traced their origin.
The Origin Breakdown
We analyzed the - incremental commits unique to Knots. Of these, -% were written by the lead maintainer or ported from older Core PRs. Another -% were merged from fresh Core PRs. Only -% comes from direct Knots contributors.
Who Wrote It?
Where Did It Come From?
Upstream Contributors: Core Devs in Knots
These developers actively contribute to Bitcoin Core, but their code appears in Knots because their unmerged or in-progress Core PRs were manually ported over by the Knots maintainer.
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Legacy Preservation: Maintained Code from 2011
Each dot is a Knots-only commit. The X-axis shows when the code was originally written (Author Date), and the Y-axis shows when it was last rebased into Knots (Committer Date). Dots far from the diagonal are legacy code.
What is this chart showing?
Commits clustered in the top-left represent code originally written years ago that is continuously rebased to work with modern Core updates. Of the - incremental Knots commits analyzed, - were written over 60 days before being merged, with the oldest being - days old.
Keeping Up: Knots vs Core Merge Patterns
As a downstream fork, Knots requires constant merging to stay aligned with Bitcoin Core. It spends most of its energy syncing upstream updates rather than adding new features.
The Sync Effort
This high merge ratio is the reality of maintaining a fork. It highlights the heavy operational overhead required to keep custom consensus tweaks (like RDTs) compatible with Core's active master branch.
Active Mindshare (Last 12 Months)
Is the active engineering pool migrating to Knots? This compares the number of active developers who intentionally authored code in either project over the last year.
Developer Roster: Who Really Builds Knots?
Every developer whose code appears in Knots' incremental commits. Upstream contributors are Core developers whose unmerged PRs were ported and rebased into Knots by the maintainer.
| Developer | Knots Commits | Core (All-time) | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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What Does This Mean for BIP-110?
BIP-110 proposes changes to Bitcoin's consensus rules. A key question in any consensus change is: who is actually building and maintaining the implementation?
This data shows the operational reality of Knots. As a specialized fork, it relies heavily on a single maintainer to port upstream code and maintain custom rules.
This analysis offers a transparent look at the development lifecycle behind the project proposing BIP-110, stripping away the noise of merge commits to see exactly how the codebase is built.
Appendix: Additional Technical Details
Tracked Ported Commits
This table captures all ported legacy commits in the codebase (code authored significantly before it was merged). It includes older code maintained by the lead developer as well as ported Bitcoin Core PRs.
| Developer | Subject | Category | Originally Authored | View In |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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Definitions
Bus Factor: Who Builds Knots?
A treemap of commit volume across all Knots contributors. The size of each block represents the proportion of commits authored by that developer. A healthy project has many similarly-sized blocks.
GitHub Divergence Explainer
If you look at the Knots repository on GitHub, you'll see a message like: This branch is - commits behind, - commits ahead of bitcoin:master.
This directly matches our data pipeline: The - commits behind are Bitcoin Core updates that Knots hasn't merged yet. The - commits ahead represent the exact - "incremental" commits analyzed on this page. This delta encompasses all the code authorship we traced above, plus the merge commits used to stitch it together.