While the ever increasingly juvenile battle rages between Core and Knots, I wanted to explain why I choose to run Knots on my 2 production nodes.

I run Knots to support and be compatible with Ocean.xyz mining as they attempt to decentralise the Bitmain dominated mining world.

There are two primary things they are doing:

1. They support the Stratum protocol through their own version DATUM, which hands back control of the mined block template to the miner that mined the block. The miner if they choose, can build their own block template and choose which transactions they accept or not. The main choices right now are do you want JPEGs or not and do you want to accept <1 Sat/vB fee transactions, which drive down mining fees and could be dangerous for the autonomy of the network.
2. Ocean pay out based on blocks found, not mining shares contributed, which means that if the Ocean pool does not find a block, you don’t get paid. But if they find blocks with “average luck” then your payout will be higher because Ocean are not subsidising failure to find blocks as most mining pools are doing, by paying out regardless of success. This pay per share model requires mining pools to fund the payouts, these funds come from lower payout fees and often from Bitmain subsidies.