What you actually own
Four things: an id, an outpoint, your own bitcoin, and a history. Nothing else is implied.
- How the artifact id is derived from your reveal txid and carrier index, and why moving the artifact never changes it.
- What an outpoint is, and why the whole depth claim rests on one of them staying unspent.
- Every field a ring records, including the flag that says the artifact ended there.
- Why an exchange holding your carrier is holding your artifact.
- The four things an artifact is not: a claim on anyone, a vote, an account, or a guaranteed picture.
1. An artifact id
The id is a hash of your reveal transaction and the carrier output index. It never changes, even when the artifact moves to a new carrier.
artifact_id = SHA256("PTNA/artifact" || reveal_txid_wire(32) || carrier_vout_le(4))It is not a serial number and it is not sequential. Nobody assigned it. Anyone with your reveal transaction can recompute it and get the same 32 bytes. Worked example with real hex on Identity and derivations.
2. A carrier outpoint
The artifact points at one unspent output, written txid:vout. That pair of values is an
outpoint, which is how Bitcoin names one specific coin, and the outpoint an artifact rests on is called its
carrier. The output belongs to your wallet in the ordinary Bitcoin sense: your key signs
for it, nobody else can move it, and no protocol rule can freeze it.
The carrier is what carries the depth. Everything the artifact claims about time is a statement about that one outpoint staying unspent, which is why depth is only ever a subtraction between two block heights.
When you spend a carrier, the artifact follows the money to a successor output and the new output becomes the carrier. The id stays the same. The depth starts again from zero. See KEEP and the default rule.
3. An endowment, in your own coins
The value sitting in the carrier is the endowment. For a founding Seal it is at least 100000 sats. The
number recorded at birth as endowment_sats never changes, whatever the carrier holds later.
- You own it before minting, during, and after.
- You can spend it whenever you like, without asking anything.
- Spending it closes the current stretch, engraves a ring, and starts a new stretch at zero, or ends the artifact if no output qualifies as a successor. A successor is an output of the spending transaction that does not start with OP_RETURN and holds at least 10000 sats.
There is no yield on it. There is no lending of it. There is no wrapper contract. It is bitcoin in an output you control, and the protocol only ever reads it.
4. A permanent history of rings
Each time a stretch ends, a ring is appended to the artifact record. The fields below are the whole of a
ring: two heights, the depth between them, the sats that sat there, and where the artifact went next. The
field to read first is relic, which is true only when the spend found no successor, so that
ring is the last one the artifact will ever have.
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
index | Position in the artifact's ring list, starting at zero |
start_height | Height of the block that created the carrier |
end_height | Height of the block that spent it |
depth | end_height - start_height |
carried_value | Sats held in the carrier during that stretch |
successor_txid, successor_vout | Where the artifact went, or null |
relic | True when this ring is the last one and the artifact ended |
Rings are the part that survives selling, spending, and mistakes. A 30000 block ring you closed by accident is still a 30000 block ring forever. Detail on Rings.
What you do not own
- No claim on anyone. There is no issuer, no redemption, no revenue share, and no promise to buy anything back.
- No governance. Holding artifacts does not vote on anything.
- No account. There is no login, no profile, and no server that holds your artifact. If every indexer in the world went offline, your carrier output and your rings would still be derivable from the Bitcoin blockchain.
- No guaranteed picture. A render is a view of the state, published by whoever published it. The state is the artifact. See the render rules.
Ownership and custody are the same question
Because the artifact lives on an outpoint, whoever can spend that outpoint controls the artifact. Give away the key and you have given away the artifact. Put the carrier on an exchange and the exchange controls it, and will almost certainly spend it into a hot wallet, which resets depth.
The practical rule: keep the carrier in a wallet you control, on a device you control, and do not let coin control tools sweep it. What resets depth lists every way it happens by accident.