If you are new here

The ninety second version#

A group of people agree to grow one story together, in a space that has an ending.

Someone opens a worldA bounded shared story with a fixed number of paths and a known ending.. Opening it fixes three things forever: how many pathsOne thread inside a world that moves forward one confirmed step at a time. it holds (between 1 and 8), how long it stays open (between 144 and 52,560 Bitcoin blocks, roughly 1 to 365 days), and how many steps any one path may take (up to 512).

Then people take those paths forward. Each stepOne confirmed move along a path. is one small Bitcoin transaction. A path can add a moment, answer an earlier moment, meet another path so that both carry on, or end on purpose.

Bitcoin is here for one reason. Everyone needs to agree on what came first, and nobody should have to host the answer. That is all it does here. There is no token, no balance, no mint, and nothing to buy.

What to look at first#

One thing, then stop.

Watch a world grow takes about two minutes. Three paths open, moments appear on them, one path answers another, two paths meet, one path ends. You will understand more from watching that once than from three pages of description, because the shape is the idea.

If you still want more after it, read one worked example. The gentlest is a collaborative garden. It shows an invitation, the paths people took, the moment they met, and how it finished.

Ignore the reference section entirely. It is written for people building software and it will make this sound harder than it is.

Permission to stop#

Here is the part most sites will not tell you.

If the ninety second version did not land, nothing further down will rescue it. ChainBloom is a narrow idea done carefully, not something everyone needs. Closing this tab is a reasonable outcome and costs you nothing.

Two honest things before you decide.

There is nothing live to browse today. The public indexerA service that reads Bitcoin blocks and rebuilds ChainBloom worlds from them. that would let anyone look at confirmed worlds is not switched on. So you cannot go and find a world that strangers are filling in right now. What is running says precisely what does and does not work.

Taking part costs real money. Not much, but real: a Bitcoin network fee paid to miners, plus 1,000 satoshis held in the output that carries your path while it is alive. That amount is released back to you when you finish the path. Reading costs nothing and always will.

Before you go further#

If you ticked all five and still want in, the next page is if you want to take part. It covers what you need, what you keep, and what you cannot undo.