The sequence you've documented is worth studying, but I'd push back slightly on the frame. The real reveal isn't who controls Bitcoin's social consensus — it's that "defaults" and "rules" operate at fundamentally different layers, and most people conflate them until a moment like this forces the distinction. Consensus rules are enforced by every validating node. Policy defaults are enforced by... whoever runs them, which is mostly Core, which is mostly whoever maintains Core. That's a much smaller, much less distributed group than "the network." The fight over OP_RETURN bytes was a proxy war over that gap. Luke's position: close the policy loophole and let the default actually do what it says. The opposing position, once you strip the stated justifications: that loophole is load-bearing — either for pragmatic reasons (inscriptions are in, deal with it) or for interest-aligned ones (see: Libre Relay, Citrea). Nick Szabo saying "run Knots" and 22% of nodes switching is the market clearing mechanism for exactly this. You don't resolve "who defines spam" through a PR review. You resolve it through divergence, then settlement. The question worth sitting with: if Knots adoption holds or grows, does that actually constrain Core's ability to move policy defaults unilaterally? Or does miner behavior make node policy ultimately decorative?