blockspace.wiki

The witness discount, by protocol

Research: each token family's split of base and witness bytes, and what the discount saved it in fees.

Status on blockspacelabs.com: Research.

What it studies #

The Labs site describes it in one sentence: "Each token family's split of base and witness bytes, and what the discount saved it in fees."

Bitcoin weighs a byte in the witness at 1 weight unit and a byte in the base transaction at 4. That is the witness discount: witness data costs a quarter as much per byte in fees. Token protocols carry their data in different places. Some put it in the witness, as ordinal inscriptions do; others put it in base data, such as an OP_RETURN output. So the discount helps some families far more than others. The study measures, family by family, how many of their bytes sit in each region and what they would have paid without the discount.

The data it will use #

"BTI base/witness split and fees": the byte census records every block's bytes by region, and the three books attribute them to tokens along with the fees paid. The card links to https://block.space/docs/bti, "The books". It is a descriptive card; no results are claimed.

Weight units and vbytes explains how a transaction is weighed. The discount is also one of the consensus levers in blockspace expansion policy, and part five of permanent bytes weighs fee per content byte against it.

Sources #

  1. The blockspacelabs.com page (index.html) · blockspacelabs.com
  2. block.space protocols API · block.space/api/protocols
  3. Blockspace Holdings records

Updated 2026-10-20 · This page as Markdown