Well there’s been thousands of hours of arguments about it so I won’t pretend to have anything new. For me… once I understood the IETF rough consensus process, Core is the open source implementation that actually has enough developers to meaningfully follow the process, and they do. With Luke’s responses to COVID, some crazy responses to cultural things, and loosing his own Bitcoin stack, I no longer trust his judgement or incentives at this point. I can’t imagine trusting my Bitcoin to software he can unilaterally change if he chooses.
As far as nodes, no one with significant Bitcoin or liability is trusting their transactions to a node set up by a third party with hardware and software that was preconfigured. So why would I when I can just load the most secure implementation on a computer with a fresh Linux operating system. If you can’t do that, or don’t have a trusted friend that can do that, I’m not convinced that you’re any safer than using the nodes Sparrow , Blockstream, or Bull wallet professionals offer as defaults in their software. If all you want is to run a “listening” node to feel like you’re contributing to the network, then it doesn’t matter anyhow and you might as well go cheap. If you are using a node to verify your own transactions, minimizing security holes is all that matters.
That’s my 2 sats. I’ve exited the Core vs Knotts discussions and only answered because it seemed like a genuine questions about my opinion. If you’re opinion is different, I get it. The cool part of bitcoin is that we each choose to bitcoin how we want, then live with the results.
