Start here
Answer one question about what you want to do, and get an ordered reading path you can keep, with your place saved in this browser.
There is no single right order to read this. What you need depends on whether you want to look, take part, build a world, or build software. Answer one question and you get a short reading path instead of a wall of links.
Pick one below. You get a short list of pages in a sensible order, with a tick beside the ones you have read. Your place is kept in this browser, on this device. There is no account and nothing is sent anywhere.
Explore a world: see what a shared history looks like before spending anything. Start with ChainBloom in 60 seconds and How a world grows.
Join a world: add your own moment to a story someone else began. Start with Join a world and Wallet connection and review.
Create a world: write the invitation other people answer. Start with The five actions and Create a world.
Build an integration: read or build ChainBloom transactions. Start with Protocol architecture and the SDK.
Run infrastructure: index the chain yourself. Start with Validation rules and Indexer requirements.
Host a cultural experience: run a world as an exhibition, festival, or class. Start with Organizations and Education.
The five minute version#
A world is a bounded shared story. Whoever creates it decides how many it has, how long it stays open, and how many steps each path may take. Those choices are fixed at the moment the world is created and can never be edited.
A path is one thread inside that world. Each path is held in place by a single small Bitcoin output. To add to a path you spend that output and create the next one. That is the whole trick: because Bitcoin will only let an output be spent once, the order of a path cannot be argued with.
There are five things anyone can do:
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Create | Opens a world and its paths |
| Bloom | Adds one creative moment to a path |
| Echo | Adds a moment that points back at an earlier one |
| Meet | Lets two paths share a moment and both carry on |
| Complete | Ends a path on purpose |
That is the entire vocabulary. Everything a world becomes is made from those five moves.
What it costs#
Two things, and no more:
- A Bitcoin network fee, paid to miners, the same as any other Bitcoin transaction. ChainBloom takes nothing.
- 1,000 satoshis held in each path output. They are carried forward from step to step, and released back to you when the path is completed.
There is no price to join, no subscription, and nothing to buy.
Where you are reading matters less than what you want#
If you have five minutes, read ChainBloom in 60 seconds and stop. It is enough to decide whether this is for you.
If you have half an hour, add How a world grows and one example world. You will be able to describe ChainBloom to someone else.
If you are about to spend money, read Fees and confirmation and Protect your path first. Both are short.
If you are writing code, skip everything above and go to Protocol architecture.