I had an unsettling thing happen today…
Looking through the community registry I noticed that it showed that I had Bitcoin Knots installed. I had never seen this before and had no memory of installing it so I uninstalled.
It immediately switched to Bitcoin core installed from the Start 9 registry and I sat there and watched as my Bitcoin Core install disappeared. Now I have reinstalled Bitcoin Core and have to wait as it re-syncs (which took several months last time), all while my wallets are useless without a connection. And it shows that Bitcoin Knots from the community registry is installed again.
This is clearly all from my own ignorance but this is also incredibly confusing.
Is Bitcoin Core not just Bitcoin Core? How, when, and why was it ever connected to this unknown (by me, anyway) thing called Bitcoin knots? Is it safe? What is this thing?
Also, how and why is a service in the start 9 registry directly connected to a completely different service in another registry with a completely different identity, especially without any of this being clearly communicated.
Thanks for any insight!
Hey Bagguette
Currently, Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots share the same ID, so StartOS recognizes them as the same service. However, it should not switch from one to the other unless you do it manually.
This will be fixed in the upcoming version 0.3.6, which is currently being tested.
For now, a simple way to switch to Core is as follows:
- Go to System tab and click the “Manage” heading 5+ times to enable developer mode
- Go to the Marketplace and find Bitcoin Core in the Start9 Registry
- Click “Reinstall”
By doing this you wont have to download the blockchain again, it will just switch from one to the other.
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Excellent info, thank you!
I have already started the install/re-sync. Will these steps still work?
And yes, it did it automatically. I had zero desire to uninstall Bitcoin core and was confident at uninstalling Bitcoin knots but nope, it had other ideas of it’s own. : )
Its best to wait until it finishes syncing and make the switch if needed.
Both Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots are Bitcoin, the latter just has a few changes to deal with what it would call “spam” on on the blockchain. Here’s a very pro-Knots search result I found so you can get a feel for their point of view.
Whichever you run on StartOS, it’ll be fine and everything will work.
As Gloriana stated, because they’re both essentially the same thing, and people would like to substitute one for the other while keeping everything else working, we need to build a feature into StartOS that allows for almost identical packages to be switch to and from without affecting the rest of the dependency stack. While we work on that, Knots needs to be available, so they need to share a name to keep everything else working.
We’ve tried to build in a couple of features to warn and stop people from changing by accident, but if someone pushed through with a change, then it takes place.
If you did change by accident, there’s no need to uninstall, reindex or do anything so extreme. Just switch back: Installing Bitcoin Knots - #5 by StuPleb
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Ok, that explains some, thank you.
From my end, just a Joe Blow maintaining my Start9, I saw a service that was totally foreign to me and that I didn’t install, which is a massive red flag in sovereign, self hosted, secure and private software and tried to uninstall and watched as it uninstalled a totally other piece of software that I use for all of my financial life, which is malware/virus/“hacked” behavior.
When Bitcoin Core finishes syncing, can I follow the steps listed above by Gloriana to uninstall this Knots?
If you’re running Core, then you’re not running Knots. There’s nothing to do except ignore instances that the OS tells you you’re using Knots and just don’t interact with them.