# Concepts The ideas behind the meter: Blockspace Value Theory, BTI, the books, attribution, carriage and the rest. URL: https://blockspace.wiki/concepts/ The ideas the projects are built on. Theory pages are marked as theory. - [Blockspace Value Theory](https://blockspace.wiki/concepts/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](https://blockspace.wiki/concepts/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](https://blockspace.wiki/concepts/attribution-and-the-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](https://blockspace.wiki/concepts/btp/): 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](https://blockspace.wiki/concepts/bytes/): 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](https://blockspace.wiki/concepts/atomicals-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](https://blockspace.wiki/concepts/bti/): The instrument behind every block.space number: it counts every byte, catalogues every token operation, and writes three books of attribution. - [The three books](https://blockspace.wiki/concepts/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](https://blockspace.wiki/concepts/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)](https://blockspace.wiki/concepts/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)](https://blockspace.wiki/concepts/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)](https://blockspace.wiki/concepts/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"](https://blockspace.wiki/concepts/the-frontier/): 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](https://blockspace.wiki/concepts/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](https://blockspace.wiki/concepts/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](https://blockspace.wiki/concepts/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](https://blockspace.wiki/concepts/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](https://blockspace.wiki/concepts/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](https://blockspace.wiki/concepts/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)](https://blockspace.wiki/concepts/spent-sats/): 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](https://blockspace.wiki/concepts/holders/): 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: - Blockspace Value Theory · https://block.space/docs/bvt - Blockspace Holdings records - block.space docs: BTI · https://block.space/docs/bti Updated: 2026-10-20