It wasn't me. Although this is kind of hilarious. Not only does it embed contiguous arbitrary data in a BIP-110 compatible txn, it exploits a default policy delta where Knots is *more* permissive than Core to get the txn mined by a Knots miner only. Genius proof of concept. 🫡

Since we're about 48 hrs away from the BIP-110 "mandatory" signaling height, I wanted to quickly share my private node crawler stats. Over the past several weeks, I gave a program of mine more spending power than is probably reasonable. It spent a not insignificant amount of BTC deduplicating nodes. Enjoy. Raw node counts (% of total) 🔵 Total: 131,762 ⚫️ Bitcoin Core: 99,401 (75.4%) ⚫️ Bitcoin Knots: 30,755 (23.3%) ⚫️ Other: 1,606 (1.2%) Raw BIP-110 signaling counts (% of total) 🔸 Bitcoin Core: 17 (0.01%) 🔸 Bitcoin Knots: 19,388 (14.7%) 🔸 Other: 0 (Unknown) 🔹 Total: 19,405 (14.7%) Nodes found to be duplicates (% of version) 🔴 Bitcoin Core: 17,892 (17.8%) 🔴 Bitcoin Knots: 18,049 (58.7%) 🔴 Other: Unknown 🔴 Total duplicates: 35,941 (27.2% of total) Deduplicated node counts (% of unique) 🟢 Bitcoin Core: 81,672 (85.1%) 🟢 Bitcoin Knots: 12,706 (9.6%) 🟢 Other: 1,606 (1.7%) 🟢 Total unique: 95,984 (72.8% of total) Of the 19,388 Bitcoin Knots BIP-110 nodes discovered signaling for BIP-110, 71% of them were eliminated as duplicates, above average for the Knots nodes, leaving only 5,663 BIP-110 signaling nodes. That puts non-duplicate BIP-110 signaling nodes at 5.9% of non-duplicate nodes. My criteria for deduplication includes the basics (same IP) and some additional more advanced sleuthing of available data. Additionally, you may have already surmised from my intro that part of it also involves strategically sending real transactions. Will keep the exact details private so that it can't be easily gamed in the future. It is impossible to find ALL duplicate nodes, however false positives are somewhat unlikely with my methodology. If my software has flagged a group of nodes as duplicate, there's an extremely high probability that its either the exact same node (with multiple IPs) or in the exact same location. If a node wasn't able to be tested thoroughly enough to be confident for whatever reason, and isn't deemed duplicate by conventional means (same IP, for example) then it isn't considered a duplicate and gives it the benefit of the doubt. If I get more time, I may start publishing some more detailed stats more regularly, since it seems my crawler successfully finds a large amount of nodes beyond those listed every public crawler. Unfortunately it's not cheap to handle the deduplication aspect, so will need to figure out how feasible that is to continue. It also involves operating from dozens of IPs to get connected to a supermajority of the network, which is pretty bandwidth intense. Anyway, figured I'd share, since I don't think anyone is actually doing this at all at this level. There's a lot more to this, too. Some of it might scare privacy conscious people... so I'll probably keep my publicly shared info limited to node stats.