#468 fixes the future. The Nov 1 cliff is still on, and Knots policy is the only brake
The 180-day rolling lock (#468) is the clear front-runner for XBT's coinbase rule. It only covers rewards mined from block 979,919 on, though. Everything mined in the current 45-day window still becomes spendable under consensus at block 979,920, about a week away. What almost nobody has said out loud: Knots' relay policy already holds those same coins longer, so on Knots nodes the "cliff" is closer to a drip.
The numbers
| Now | |
|---|---|
| Locked rewards (blocks 973,440 to 979,918) | 17,213 XBT in 457,390 outputs |
| Moved so far | 0 |
| Tip | 978,943 |
| Blocks to 979,920 | 977, about Nov 1 |
| Largest single holder | AlphaPool, about 5,063 XBT (29%) |
From the xbt.live lock tracker. FlyTheElephant1 puts the figure at 20,250 in the #468 thread; counts differ by method.
What #468 does and doesn't do
- Does: every reward mined from 979,919 waits 25,920 blocks (about 180 days), each on its own clock, until RDTS expires on Sept 1, 2027.
- Doesn't: touch the current window. In the PR's own words, "At and after that height, rewards mined before 979919 require 100-block consensus maturity."
- Status: open, not merged, in the knots-dev 29.4.3rc5 test build only. Luke Dashjr's Concept NACK stands.
Consensus says cliff. Relay says drip.
Two developers working on the code describe the same gap. kwsantiago, in #482: the window's rewards are held to 6,480 blocks "consensus until 979920; relay keeps holding them after that." FlyTheElephant1, in #483: "policy already holds coinbase outputs created in the temporary window to 6480-block maturity," and "Consensus does not."
In plain terms: a Knots node won't accept or relay a spend of one of those rewards until that reward is 6,480 blocks deep. The reward from block 973,440 clears at 979,920, the one from 973,441 at 979,921, and so on, until the last one clears around block 986,398. That's a 45-day trickle, not one block.
The catch is that policy isn't consensus:
- Miners can skip relay. A pool can put a spend of its own matured-by-consensus rewards straight into a block it mines. Every node has to accept that block. The biggest holders are pools, so this is the real risk.
- Other software may relay. Nodes running code without this policy can pass the spends around and hand them to miners.
- So the drip holds only as long as the miners holding the coins go along with it.
The cliff fixes on the table
| PR | Idea | Where it is |
|---|---|---|
| #477 | Keep each window reward on its 6,480-block lock after 979,920 (consensus matches policy) | Concept ACK from sturms; Concept NACK from j-smith99 |
| #483 | Same goal, consensus matches policy for the window | Opened today |
| #478 | Start the 180-day lock at 973,440, covering the window too | "468+478" ACKs from kosdas, sx3653, WesAshley; Concept NACK from j-smith99 |
| #479 | 180 days for window coins, then a 100-block grace period | Little support |
| #480 | Make the 45-day lock permanent | Tested ACK from geobees |
| #476 | One-year rolling lock, no cliff | New tested ACK from webtrekker95-hue today |
What people are saying
"468+478 is the way to go. No sudden release of big amount of coins, and 180 days rolling."
kosdas, on #478
"I believe there should be a substantially higher burden of justification for retroactively changing the spendability of already-mined coinbase rewards."
j-smith99, on #477
"I think we should let Long CBM expire after the 45 days, and revisit it if the situation changes."
GregTonoski, on #468, adding "(same as Luke's position)"
Our take
The most likely path is #468 ships and the window's coins come unlocked under consensus at 979,920. Knots' own policy turns that into a 45-day drip for anything that goes through the mempool. It does nothing about a pool mining its own spends. #477 is the smallest change that would close that hole, and with a week left it's the only fix that looks realistic. Watch the pools holding the most locked coins once the release block hits.
If you run a node, upgrade the moment an official Knots release ships. A node on old rules will follow whatever the miners do.
Live Knots trackerUnlock countdown
Sources: Knots PRs #468, #476 to #480, #482 and #483 and their review threads (Oct 22 to 25, 2026); xbt.live lock tracker at block 978,943. Quotes are verbatim and trimmed. Not financial advice.
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