Concepts

The ideas the projects are built on. Theory pages are marked as theory.

• Blockspace Value Theory
  BVT, a living document and an untested thesis: that tokens built on consumed Bitcoin blockspace form one commodity, priced in kilobytes.
• Blockspace
  What blockspace is: the bytes Bitcoin's blocks hold, as BTI counts them, and what Blockspace Value Theory proposes about them.
• Attribution and the Shared Claim Axiom
  The Shared Claim Axiom: when several tokens claim the same consumed bytes, they share them equally. Plus the B19 draft, which proposes a different test.
• BTP, the Blockspace Token Protocol
  BTP is a draft (0.1, 2026-07-29) of a protocol whose subject is blockspace itself: which token owns which consumed bytes. It does not exist.
• BYTES, a fungible blockspace token
  BYTES is a draft (0.2, 2026-07-29) of a token minted one per byte of consumed blockspace. It does not exist; its economics are analysed in a companion document.
• Atomicals as a natural experiment
  An observation offered to BVT: Atomicals kept its consumed blockspace and lost its community, so its market is a test between Reading B and Reading C.
• BTI, the Blockspace Token Indexer
  The instrument behind every block.space number: it counts every byte, catalogues every token operation, and writes three books of attribution.
• The three books
  Book A (inclusive), Book B (regional) and Book C (content): three answers to how many bytes back a token, with C ≤ B ≤ A on every entry.
• Carriage and the free-ride index
  Bought or riding: why bytes a token merely rode are measured but never backing, and how B/A shows how much of a token's inclusive claim is its own.
• The byte census (T1)
  BTI's first layer: one protocol-blind pass recording every transaction's size, vsize, weight and fee, and where in each block the data sits.
• Claims (T2)
  BTI's second layer: metaprotocol adapters and BTI's own decoders turn each protocol's records into append-only facts about which token touched which bytes.
• The books (T3)
  BTI's third layer: a pure function of T1 and T2 that divides shared bytes among tokens, allocates fees and writes the book entries, the aggregates and the consensus hash.
• The frontier and "as of block H"
  How far each stage of BTI and its appendix has got, why the cursors are ordered books ≤ claims ≤ census, and why every block.space figure carries its height.
• Weight units and vbytes
  Three ways to size a Bitcoin transaction (raw bytes, weight units and vbytes), the exact formulas, and why BTI's books count raw bytes.
• The witness discount
  SegWit weighs witness bytes at a quarter of base bytes. What that does to fees, how BTI measures it per protocol, and what Blockspace Value Theory proposes it means.
• Fee rate
  What a transaction pays per vbyte, why a witness byte costs a quarter of a base byte, and how BTI divides fees among the tokens a transaction was bought for.
• Relay policy
  What a node will relay, as opposed to what is valid: the fee floor and sub-1 sat/vB relay, the standard size, data-carrier limits and full-RBF, from Blockspace Holdings' own node.
• Sats and ordinals
  Every sat is separately ownable and numbered by ord. How BTI treats the sat as a token, why rarity is not one, and the Ordinal Sats family on block.space.
• Inscriptions
  Files bound to sats by ord: the witness envelope that carries them, the commit and reveal, recursion and delegation, cursed inscriptions, and how BTI books their bytes.
• Spent sats (blockspace.to)
  blockspace.to is an ord explorer and indexer that also keeps the sat ranges of spent outputs. What that adds, what uses it, and the live state of its index.
• Holders and share of backing
  Who holds the tokens BTI measures, and how each token's bytes divide among its holders: the holders appendix, the rule of shares, coverage, and the leaderboard population.

Sources #

1. Blockspace Value Theory · block.space/docs/bvt
2. block.space docs: BTI · block.space/docs/bti
3. Blockspace Holdings records