Andrey on Nostr: You’re mistaking node policy for central planning. There’s no single entity ...

You’re mistaking node policy for central planning.

There’s no single entity deciding what’s “monetary.” But individual node runners absolutely have the right to choose what they relay. That’s not authoritarianism — it’s sovereignty.

Bitcoin’s power lies in voluntary consensus — not passive acceptance of every valid-but-abusive transaction. The protocol sets the floor (what’s valid), not the ceiling (what’s acceptable).

And yes, steganography can hide data — but that’s not an argument to give up filtering entirely, it’s an argument to keep it tight where we can. OP_RETURN was introduced precisely to reduce harm from worse techniques — now we're removing the very policy that made it safe.

Fees alone don’t filter — MARA shows us that. They’ll take side deals, slip data in out-of-band, and treat consensus like a vending machine. That’s not freedom — that’s just working to rule all over again.

You call Knots a “fork of shitcoin” — but when you remove configurability from Core and call dissent authoritarian, ask yourself: who’s really trying to centralize?