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.

Our SCCR model ran on N = 32,000. That number was a truncated address sample, not a node count: the node's address manager actually holds 61,302 addresses, and the measured reachable-node count is 26,586. Because SCCR is inverse-linear in N, every value rises by 1.2036x — the frozen capture moves 0.2406 to 0.2896, and L_net falls from $5,627.80 to $4,675.65 per block. The direction of the finding did not change; the magnitude did.

Non-listening nodes — behind NAT, never accepting inbound — are invisible to every crawler. The only way to observe them is to be reachable yourself and count who dials in. This machine sits behind carrier-grade NAT (five stacked private hops, a shared public IP), and the carrier firewalls inbound IPv6. So we borrowed a public IPv6 and ran a PROXY-protocol relay that preserves the peer's real source address. The tunnel came up and the SYNs arrived — but macOS sent the replies out the wrong interface. A packet capture found it; one routing fix later, an external host reached our node with its address intact.

A full reindex validates every block in order on one machine, and Core logs the wall-clock time of each connected block. That makes the reindex a natural experiment in what validation actually costs. Measured on a MacBook Air: 23 ms per block in 2009 rising to 928 ms per block in 2018 — a 40x increase — while per-transaction cost stayed roughly flat near 130 microseconds. The cost side of the storage thesis, measured instead of modelled.

We tested the obvious shortcut: geolocate the mining pools' stratum endpoints. Measured result — 10 of 14 addresses are CDN-fronted (Cloudflare, Amazon), so the country you get back belongs to the edge, not the pool, and the miners themselves never appear anywhere in it. Pool-IP geolocation is a CDN-geography method. Two approaches would actually work, and both need something this project does not have yet.

We audited all 47 live pages for stale numbers and broken rendering. Most had already labelled their pre-re-base figures honestly. But the reproduction protocol told a stranger to expect 0.2406 when the kit actually produces 0.2896 — a false failure waiting to happen — one page was serving 51 literal markdown-bold markers rendered as visible text, and a fix we had already shipped had been silently reverted. What the audit found, and the discipline it forced.

Reachable nodes are about a third of Bitcoin's network; non-listening nodes are the other two thirds — a ratio of roughly 1:2 that holds across independent methods. Both classes relay blocks. Yet no published figure gives a per-block "X% public, Y% private" split, and there is a structural reason: a non-listening node keeps only ~10 outbound connections while a reachable node can hold 125, so listening nodes absorb every outbound attempt and sit in the hub position.

The September 2026 bridge exploits were reported as "46 billion fake BTC." We audited the Bitcoin base layer in each incident window: the exact anchor blocks, the BTC actually issued, and the gap — 1.13 billion to 1 — between a claimed token supply and bitcoin. The bug lived on other chains. Bitcoin was untouched.

A bitcoin-only monitor catches drains and is blind to Symbiosis — where 46 billion tokens were minted and no bitcoin ever moved. The fix is to read both ledgers and watch the ratio: reserves over supply. Both exploit families drive it below 1, from opposite sides. Live against WBTC it also exposed a reserve page that doesn't enumerate its own reserve.

SCCR 0.4307 is easy to over-read. It does not mean Bitcoin is 57% underfunded. It means fees fund roughly the first 3 of the 10 modelled years of the node-cost commitment, and node operators carry the rest. The note also documents a trap we nearly fell into: two rows of the cost table are the same cost at different horizons, and their coverage percentages differ by exactly T.