What it does not promise
These limits are structural. They are not bugs waiting for a fix, and they are printed in the product, not only here.
- That depth proves only that one outpoint has not been spent since a given height, and why a key sold off chain leaves no trace at all.
- What a fresh attestation adds to that claim, and what it still cannot show.
- Why published concentration is a floor on concentration rather than a measurement of it.
- What a buyer receives when an artifact is sold, and which number restarts at zero.
- Which mistakes nobody can undo, including a carrier swept into a batch payment.
Depth does not prove one person held it
What depth proves is exact and narrow: this outpoint has not been spent since this height. An outpoint is one specific output, named by its transaction id and its index in that transaction. So this is a fact about an output, not about a human.
Keys can be sold. If someone hands over a private key in a bar, the outpoint never moves, depth keeps climbing, and the chain shows nothing at all. A deep artifact may have had one owner, or six.
An attestation narrows this a little. Signing the attestation message with the carrier key at a recent block hash shows that whoever signed can still sign right now. It raises the claim from "this output has not moved" to "this output has not moved and someone with the key is here today". It still does not prove continuity of a person, because the signer could be the person who bought the key an hour ago.
Unmoved since height H, and with a fresh attestation, still signable today. Nothing more.
Founding membership can be farmed
Any person or business with enough bitcoin can create many founding Seals during the window. Each one needs its own commit, its own reveal, its own 100000 sats, and its own fees, but none of that stops somebody with capital.
We do not filter, because every filter we could build would need someone to trust us, and nobody here holds that kind of authority. Instead:
- Concentration statistics are published during the window, not after it closes.
- The numbers come from public chain data, so anyone can recompute them and check.
- A large concentration is reported as a fact, not spun as demand.
Note the limit on the limit: address clustering is a heuristic. Someone splitting across many fresh addresses looks like many holders. Treat published concentration as a floor on concentration, not a measurement of it.
Buying an artifact resets it
There is no transfer that keeps depth. Depth belongs to the carrier, the one unspent output the artifact rides on. Moving that output is what resets depth, and a sale moves it. The buyer gets:
- the same artifact id,
- every ring the artifact ever closed, including the seller's,
- a current depth of zero, counting from the block their new carrier confirms.
If you want the depth, you have to hold, and holding is the only way. That is the point of the design and also its hardest edge for anyone hoping to trade in.
Selling the key instead of the coin is possible and would preserve depth, but the buyer then has to trust that the seller kept no copy. That is a private arrangement with private risk. The protocol takes no position on it and cannot see it.
No price, no market, no promises about value
PATINA has no mint price and no protocol treasury. It does not create a market, run one, or make claims about what an artifact will be worth. There are no projections in this documentation and there will not be any.
What the indexer can and cannot tell you
Each row pairs something an indexer can settle from chain data with the thing people assume follows from it. Nothing in the right column follows, and no amount of indexing will change that.
| Can | Cannot |
|---|---|
| This outpoint was created at height H and is still unspent | Who created it |
| This artifact closed a ring of N blocks | Whether the same person held both ends of it |
| This carrier pays this address | Whether that address belongs to one person |
| This many artifacts are alive right now | How many distinct humans hold them |
| This attestation verifies at this block hash | Whether the signer is the original minter |
Operational limits
- Reorgs. Recent state can change. An artifact created three blocks ago may be undone by a reorg. Six confirmations is the point where the indexer treats history as final. See Reorg behavior.
- Indexers can disagree. Two implementations can produce different state from the same chain if one has a bug. That is why state roots and golden vectors exist, and why disagreements get published rather than patched quietly. See Report a disagreement.
- Nothing can be paused for you. There is no admin key that can freeze an artifact, reverse a spend, or restore a reset. Operators can pause their own reads and writes; they cannot pause Bitcoin. See Incident actions.
- Mistakes are final. If you consolidate your carrier into a batch payment, the depth is gone. There is no support channel that can restore it.
The same boundaries, written for someone who has not read the specification, are on the public site page every way this can let you down.