It’s Filters All the Way Down: aeonBTC Attempts to Untie the Lukian Knot

In a bold act of circular logic and centralized righteousness, aeonBTC, Bitcoin’s self-appointed Minister of Censorship Resistance and spiritual leader of the ANTIKA (Anti-Knotzi Army), unveiled his latest invention: a centralized blacklist of people who make blacklists. Yes, dear reader, the scourge of the filtrooor class has now been heroically countered by... a filter.

“Decentralization requires firm control!” aeonBTC thundered from his pulpit, a modestly sized Nostr feed with more pins than the Federal Reserve balance sheet. “We cannot allow these Knotzi nodes to poison the mempool with their spam-free fee estimation!”

For those fortunate enough to have never attended this particular clown rodeo: Bitcoin Knots is an alternative Bitcoin node implementation that, horror of horrors, allows its users to choose to filter spam (or not... really it just lets you do whatever you want). In polite circles, this is called “opting out.” In aeonBTC’s circles, it’s called “economic censorship,” or as his disciples prefer, “OP_RETURNSCHWITZ.”

aeonBTC, who once threatened to fork reality itself after seeing a Peter Todd tweet, has made it his mission to scourge the network of anything resembling voluntary coordination. His personal website, censorshipresistant.com, outlines a brave vision: Bitcoin, but with all the spam, forever, amen. Yet in a tragicomic twist, this prophet of “permissionless purity” has opted to curate a list of evil nodes, mostly Knots runners.

“This isn’t filtering,” he clarified in a ten-thousand-word thread. “It’s anti-filtering. It’s like… reverse censorship. With extra freedom.”

The aeon List™, as it is affectionately known by those who love bureaucratic names for anarchic goals, is reportedly maintained in a DEI compliant Github repository, lovingly hosted on a centralized server in the People's Republic of New York.

The aeon List™ includes such nefarious characters as Luke-jr, anyone who can spell “mempool,” and one poor soul who once suggested limiting P2SH nesting to fewer than 15 levels. At press time, The list had been cloned, forked, and re-forked into over 42 competing “anti-filtrooor” blocklists.

To say the ANTIKA movement has entered its Jacobin phase is to undersell it. Heads are metaphorically rolling, and some nodes are literally forking themselves in half. One dev reported his node “spontaneously combusted in protest” after being connected to both a Knots node and a RaspiBlitz running LND.

Meanwhile, Luke Dashjr, better known as Luke-jr, the hallowed high priest of Bitcoin Knots, remains unfazed. “Freedom means the freedom to ignore garbage,” he said, while sipping distilled taproot from a tulip-shaped Lightning mug. “If someone wants to broadcast 30,000 JPEGs of Pikachu flipping the bird to Satoshi, that's their prerogative. But if I don't want that on my node, I should be allowed to say, ‘No thanks, mate.’ That’s not censorship, it's just good manners.”

To the Coremunists—those ideological foot soldiers who believe consensus must be centrally curated lest someone somewhere send a transaction without paying five bucks in fees—Luke-jr’s approach is heresy. To the rest of Bitcoin, it’s Tuesday.

As for aeonBTC, he remains busy maintaining the blacklist of the blacklist of the blacklist. He’s reportedly working on a zero-knowledge proof that proves he hasn’t censored anyone, while simultaneously banning every node with “knots” in the user-agent string.

In the end, Bitcoin marches on, oblivious to the ironic pyres lit in its name. The blocks keep ticking. The miners keep mining and somewhere, deep in the memetic trenches, a brave node operator opens a new tab to see whether he’s been added to The aeon List™... and whether that means he’s won or lost.

In the sacred words of Bitcoin’s most misunderstood developer, “It’s not censorship if you do it yourself.” Or maybe, like turtles, it’s just filters all the way down.