The Bitcoin Sahi Research Archive

The founding question: does Bitcoin's fee market pay for the storage it permanently creates? We built a live data platform with a Bitcoin Core node and five research agents to find out.

A one-sentence frame for the whole program: Bitcoin's fee market prices competition for the next block, but not the long-term resource costs of permanently recorded data. Here's the question, stated plainly.

The story of internal validation: a duplicated time-horizon term inflated storage cost by 10×. We corrected it, regenerated every value, and confirmed the conclusion survived. Honesty is the methodology.

From cypherpunk origins to Ordinals — a block-space-economics reading of Bitcoin's history, and why the SegWit witness discount became the pricing structure inscriptions use today.

We cleared the blackboard and read the whitepaper as a freshly discovered manuscript. The master pattern: every mechanism makes correct action cheap and incorrect action expensive.

A reviewer asked: "a nation state could flood your computer with garbage." We priced the attack. Filling every block costs ~$65M/yr and imposes ~$197M of storage cost — a 3× leverage ratio. Dust is the surprise: its real threat is RAM, not storage.

Verified verbatim from the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute: "storage should not be a problem," the node-equilibrium prediction, and the block-size cap as a "circuit breaker." Primary sources, quoted exactly.

Validation is the one cost every node pays that can't be pruned. Our order-of-magnitude survey: ~$0.5–5/yr per node, with a falsifiable claim — under $100/yr, central estimate $1–2. The four-resource model gets its third leg.

The witness discount made witness data 4× cheaper per byte in block weight — a 2017 malleability fix that became 2023's inscription subsidy. Whether it prices permanence is the research question.

Hashrate concentration isn't protocol control. UASF/URSF are coordination mechanisms, not proof of who holds power. BIP-110's mandatory-signaling window is a natural experiment in the governance boundary — and we're recording it hourly.

The UTXO set is the index every node carries. We wired `utxo_size_inc` end-to-end and measured it live: ~29.9 KB of net permanent state per block, 165 backfilled heights. The fourth resource leg is now data, not assumption.

Pruned nodes still download and verify every block. Storage is avoidable; bandwidth and CPU are not. The pruning note answers the "just prune" objection: the unavoidable burden is real, though small today.

The Storage Cost Coverage Ratio is falling — from ~0.28 to 0.238 across the measured days. Fees are covering less of the modeled storage cost that confirmed data imposes. An early 4-point series with its uncertainty left visible: a directional signal from a young series, not a settled trend.

Storage coverage nearly tripled in roughly four days — measured live on real blocks. The share of blocks below the full-coverage 1× threshold fell from 100% to 96.2%. It is the first sustained break above the ~0.22–0.29 baseline that defined the prior record.

We frosted two primary series: difficulty from 2009 (1,614 points) and mempool congestion from 2016 (1,498 points). Row 10 moves from grade B to A; row 3 to B*. The headline: 2024 was the congestion peak — 96.6% of days above 50K pending transactions.

The SCCR era legs are grade B — correct in aggregate, unverified per block. This strip samples actual blocks across 2010–2026 so the daily-derived fee and size legs can be checked against direct observation, and quantifies the SegWit-era size/weight divergence.

A new producing-side instrument: energy cost versus production value, per era. The ratio rose from 0.32 (2017) to 0.84 (2026), while fees covered 35.7% of production cost in 2017 but just 0.7% in 2026 — the block-space share of the mining economy, shrinking.

A continuous historical UTXO-count series would move row 6 from grade D to C. We probed every public source: none publishes an unspent-count series. We document what is reachable — 3.9B cumulative outputs, a 769 GB chain — and cross-check the VCI chain leg to within 2.7%.

Moving row 11 from C to B needs an independent per-pool hashrate source. Most pool APIs are DNS-blocked or token-gated; we record precisely what is and isn't reachable, and show the 7/7 top pools agree internally within ≤1.5σ across every window.

Our first non-SCCR empirical governance observation: the mandatory-signaling window opened at height 961,632, locked in at 963,648 on 2026-08-23 00:48:47 UTC, and we snapshotted the post-lock-in state at 966,270 — verified against primary sources.