If you truly want to trivialize Bitcoin Core's influence on policy, Knotzis have at least one thing right: it is by competing (Knots), not complaining. Ok ok they also complain a lot...
For protocol designers, the Bitcoin policy debate exposes an interesting design primitive:
What is standard is what people use, not what people spec.
There may be nuance in Bitcoin when we say a method is "un-enforcable" in that it merely requires external consensus to enforce.
The distinction is that the market can compete on policy! This is at the very least, an interesting distraction from fork proposals!
But John, filters don't work! True, but they would work if all the miners ran them, and they already do intentionally exclude valid poison txns, so we know they can effectively censor, at least while the attacker is unwilling to increase the bribe.
People can start making their own distros of Bitcoin intentionally, like Knots, but get much more creative on the feature sets around config, policy, and mempool designs.
We can have "smart" nodes, entirely new mempool designs, multi-mempools, private-submission for relays, monetized relay...
Where's your creativity? Stop bickering and make something interesting! You could bootstrap an entire new implementation this way!
