The Load-Bearing Layer
Why running a node matters more than ever.
A node is not a symbol. It is a computer, running software, checking every block against rules it will not bend. That is the whole job. It is also, it turns out, the whole point.
Even so, BIP-110 did not activate. The miners did not signal. A minority tried to force the question and the network answered by not answering, which is its own kind of answer.
Knut Svanholm wrote an honest retrospective about it.
He supported the fork, he explains why, and he lands on two possible explanations for why it failed. Either Bitcoin has been captured by a cabal of miners and compromised developers, or the movement simply did not have enough economic weight for the first domino to fall. He does not fully choose between them.
He does say something else worth pausing on first. Node runners, he writes, are now aware that they have very little influence over the network unless they accept Bitcoin for their goods and services and actually validate the transactions coming in. Five thousand new nodes went up during this fight. Start9 and Umbrel both had record sales. And still, by his own account, that was not enough to move anything. A man who spent a year fighting for this fork just told his own side that running the software was not the hard part.
Samson Mow read Knut’s piece and offered a correction. It was not that miners ignored BIP-110, he said. It was almost everyone. Miners, exchanges, wallets, economic actors. Nodes matter, but only as a proxy for economic weight, and that weight was largely absent. Proof of work is what actually decides these things.
I want to take Mow’s point seriously and then explain why it does not get him where he thinks it does.
He is right about the mechanism. A node that verifies the chain but transacts freely on whatever chain wins is invisible to the market. It has opinions but no weight. If the UASF crowd wanted to force a change, we needed people willing to refuse the majority chain economically, not just run alternative software on it. That did not happen at scale. Mow is not wrong about why the fork failed.
Where he overreaches is one specific sentence: nodes cannot and should not be able to influence the network. That is not a description of what happened with BIP-110. That is a claim about what nodes are for, and it is wrong. A node that rejects an invalid block is influence. It is the only kind that does not need permission. Mow is right that mempool policy could not force a change. He is wrong to conclude from that failure that node-level refusal has no proper role at all. Diagnosing why a vote failed is not the same as proving that voting was the wrong kind of thing to do.
Go back to what Bitcoin was actually for. A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. A decentralized monetary protocol with a hard cap.
Not a spam filter. Not a mempool policy standard. A solution to the Byzantine Generals problem: how do mutually distrusting strangers reach agreement without a trusted third party. Everything else, the difficulty adjustment, proof of work itself, exists in service of that one question. And nodes are a necessary part of the protocol.
This is where the concentration fear that a lot of people are quietly sitting with actually belongs. Miners have become concentrated enough, geographically and financially, that state coercion is not a paranoid hypothetical anymore. That is a legitimate fear.
A hard fork to a new chain does not solve coercion. It resets who holds the hash power and hopes the new set is harder to capture, until the same economies of scale that concentrated the last one do it again.
What actually survives coercion is the thing BIP-110 tested and found underbuilt. Nodes cannot force miners to adopt a policy. But nodes can and do reject an invalid block outright, no vote required, no persuasion needed. A supply cap violation gets orphaned by full nodes regardless of how much hash power sits behind it. That is not a popularity contest. That is the load-bearing wall.
Mow makes two more points worth answering directly. He is right that the bar for consensus changes has to be very high, because even miners can signal for something they do not actually intend to enforce. That is not an argument against node power. It is the same distinction again: soft signals are cheap, hard rules are not, and the high threshold exists because signaling alone was never meant to be trusted on its own.
He also calls BIP-110 iatrogenic, harm caused by well-meaning people trying to fix something that was not broken, and reaches for the Blocksize War as precedent. I would ask him to sit with that comparison a little longer. The tool BIP-110 used was a UASF, a minority refusing blocks until the network complied. That is the same tool that forced SegWit into Bitcoin in 2017, against a large share of hash power that did not want it. Nobody calls that one iatrogenic.
BIP-110 tested the soft kind of node power, the kind that depends on convention and buy-in, and found its limits. It did not test the hard kind. Nobody has, because everyone already knows how that fight ends. The lesson of this fork is not that nodes are powerless. It is that we found the boundary between where node sovereignty is decorative and where it is structural, and mempool policy sits on the wrong side of that line.
I do not have an answer to what my own node’s economic weight amounts to, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I run Knots. I run a BTCPay server. I was part of the sandbox for a Fedimint guardian project. None of that moves markets. But economic weight was never supposed to come from one node. It comes from what a node does when it disagrees, multiplied by how many other nodes would do the same thing at the same moment. A million people like me, running alternative software and settling even modest volume through self-hosted infrastructure instead of a custodian, is a bloc nobody gets to ignore. We are not there yet. Mow is right that we are not there yet. That is not the same as saying we never will be.
There is a second problem sitting underneath all of this that almost nobody is naming, and it worries me more than the concentration question. Knots exists because one person built it and maintains it. Ocean.xyz exists in large part because the same person runs it. If that person moves on to build something else entirely, a different proof of work chain, who inherits the responsibility of keeping either project alive?
This is not a rhetorical question. I do not know the answer. I am not the person with the C++ background to be that answer myself. But not having the answer is not a reason to stay quiet about the question, and I would rather name this risk now, while it is still hypothetical, than after the fact, the way we all found ourselves naming the Coldcard vulnerability after it was already a crisis.
The story is not over. I said that right after the Bip-110 fork:
Not Over
Block 961,632 came and went. The chain split, the way the mechanism said it would if signaling stayed low. It stayed low. Roughnecks signaled. Foundry didn’t. Twenty blocks later the legacy chain was ahead, and it was tempting to call it. Some did.
And I still believe it, though not for the reason I believed it then. The alternative fork still might activate. But changing the proof of work, and starting over from zero cannot be the right answer. The miners, nodes and the entire protocol have to continue, warts and all.
The nodes have to continue to do their job. Be the maintainers. Do the unglamorous work of keeping alternative software alive so the option to refuse is still there the next time it matters. That work does not resolve. It just continues. More of us need to be the ones doing it, running nodes, running Knots, today and for whatever comes next.
Paul Weaver writes at paulweaver34.substack.com on Bitcoin, faith, institutional trust, and the spaces between worlds.
Good questions, Paul. I agree with you conclusoin - more of us need to be running nodes and perhaps mining and offering goods and services that can be paid for in BTC. Mining is next for me. There seem to be a lot of options out there, and at the moment I know very little about theem.