Half of XBT nodes now run Knots 29.4.3, two days before the 180-day lock
About 48% of reachable XBT nodes now run Knots 29.4.3, up from about a third on Wednesday night. Most of the rest are still on 29.4.2, with roughly two days until block 979,919, where 29.4.3's 180-day lock begins.
The count
| Reachable nodes, 01:00 UTC Oct 30 | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Knots 29.4.3 (release, rc5 and Plumb builds) | 532 | 48% |
| Knots 29.4.2 | 489 | 44% |
| Other versions (92 of them don't enforce the coinbase lock) | 99 | 9% |
| Total reachable | 1,120 |
That's up from about 370 on 29.4.3 Wednesday night and 486 Thursday morning. Reachable nodes accept incoming connections, so this is a floor; the full network is bigger. Live node counts.
Why 29.4.2 matters now
A 29.4.2 node enforces today's 45-day lock but not the new 180-day one. From block 980,019, about 100 blocks after the change, a 29.4.2 node could accept blocks that 29.4.3 nodes reject, and end up following a different chain. Miners on 29.4.2 could produce those blocks from about block 986,399. Every build is on bitcoinknots.org now, including Windows, x86-64 Linux and the StartOS package. How to upgrade and verify.
New on the lock: tie it to difficulty
A new draft pull request, #490 from Signalarity, proposes "Dynamic Coinbase Maturity" for after RDTS expires in Sept 2027. The lock length would move with difficulty: in the PR's words, "if the upcoming difficulty adjustment were +3%, the upcoming CBM adjustment would also be +3%." It would never drop below 100 blocks, and each reward keeps the lock it was mined under.
It's an experiment, not a proposal to activate. The PR says it is "not a request to activate DCBM on mainnet or public testnet," and it runs only on regtest so far. No reviews yet.
Housekeeping
- #468, the 180-day lock itself, still shows as open on GitHub. It shipped in 29.4.3 through the release branch.
- A batch of smaller fixes landed in the PR queue Oct 28 to 29, mostly backports from Bitcoin Core: log forging (#495), wallet overflow (#496), RPC console (#497), unreadable coins database (#494).
- Difficulty adjusts at block 979,776, about 120 blocks out, estimated near +7.8%.
Node counts from xbt.live's crawler at 01:00 UTC Oct 30, 2026. Pull request details from github.com/bitcoinknots/bitcoin, quoted verbatim. Not financial advice.
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