Most institutional Bitcoin investors have little awareness of — or interest in — the ongoing Bitcoin Core vs. Bitcoin Knots dispute, according to Alex Thorn, head of research at Galaxy Digital.
The debate revolves around Bitcoin’s purpose and whether non-financial transactions should be excluded from the blockchain. Tensions have escalated following the release of Bitcoin Core v30, which critics claim could open the “floodgates” to spam.
Knots supporters argue that this type of “spam” should be filtered out to prevent bad actors from embedding illegal or harmful content on-chain.
Bitcoin Core developers, however, warn that imposing such limits could fragment the network, confuse users, and undermine a core principle of Bitcoin: open, permissionless data inclusion.
Institutions Mostly Uninvolved
In an X post on Monday, Thorn said he reached his conclusion after polling 25 institutional Bitcoin investors that Galaxy works with.
- 46% said they weren’t aware of the dispute.
- 36% said they didn’t care or felt neutral.
- The remaining 18% all sided with Bitcoin Core’s position.
According to Thorn, the findings suggest that while the debate is intense within the Bitcoin community, it barely registers among institutional investors.
“Real capital, real investors, service providers, even government officials see no problem at all or are unaware there’s even a debate at best it’s a hypothetical problem, and their proposed solution does nothing to solve the (fake) problem they claim is real,” Thorn said.
“Even if it is adopted all their legal theories are mumbo jumbo and the fears about them are ones that everyone got comfortable with years ago during early debates over the legality of permissionless decentralized systems.”
Bitcoin Poll Was Small but Representative, Says Thorn
Although the poll included only 25 institutional Bitcoin investors, Alex Thorn acknowledged questions about its sample size, calling the concern a “fair question.” Still, he emphasized that the results accurately reflect what he has observed across the industry.
“I won’t reveal their identities, but I will say yes — and the results from that poll line up exactly with my conversations with other whales, investors, leaders at mining firms and service providers, and government officials over the last several months,” Thorn explained.
He added that while he didn’t formally survey miners, he maintains close relationships with most of the major ones, and “nobody cares or is following at all” when it comes to the Core vs. Knots debate.
Three Outcomes on the Horizon
Tensions escalated last month when a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal for a soft fork sparked outrage on X due to a section that appeared to suggest legal consequences for those who opposed the update.
Thorn believes the broader dispute could ultimately end in one of three ways — and one of those outcomes poses a real risk to Bitcoin’s adoption.
The first possibility, he said, is that “no one cares and they fade into obscurity.”
“The second most likely outcome is they incept the problem they fear into existence by scaring everyone away from Bitcoin — and still their fork ideas fail.”
“A third and exceedingly distant likelihood is that their proposed changes become adopted… but even in that unlikely scenario, their solutions fall short. And because their solutions fall short and they will have scared the world into fearing permissionless systems, Bitcoin adoption will be irreparably harmed.”
