Raw
TIER 00 blockswhere every artifact starts
Cold metal, straight off the mould. The carrier exists and nothing has happened to it yet.
0 days, 0 years
The tier journey
Raw, Sheen, Cast, Verdigris, Umber, Bronze, Oxide, Elder.
A tier is the highest threshold your depth has passed. That is the entire rule. Nothing is granted, nothing is claimed, and nothing about a tier changes what you can do with your bitcoin.
01 Eight bands
Each one is a material, and a number you can check.
The discs are drawn from the same geometry as the specimen on the overview, so a card and a live artifact are recognisably the same object. Each disc is filled to its own band, with the bands still ahead scribed as dashes.
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Sheen
TIER 11 008 blocksabout 7 days
The first thin film on the surface. A week without touching something is longer than most people manage.
7.00 days, 0.02 years
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Cast
TIER 24 032 blocksabout 28 days
Set hard. Exactly as long as the founding window itself, spent standing still.
28.00 days, 0.08 years
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Verdigris
TIER 312 960 blocksabout 90 days
The green has come through. A quarter of a year of separate decisions not to spend.
90.00 days, 0.25 years
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Umber
TIER 426 280 blocksabout 182 days
Darkened all the way through. Half a year of fee spikes, price moves and second thoughts survived.
182.50 days, 0.50 years
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Bronze
TIER 552 560 blocksabout 1 year
A full year on one outpoint. The wallet has been opened and closed many times without touching this.
365.00 days, 1.00 years
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Oxide
TIER 6105 120 blocksabout 2 years
Two years. Long enough that the reason it was left alone has turned into a habit.
730.00 days, 2.00 years
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Elder
TIER 7210 000 blocksabout 4 years
The last tier. Roughly one halving of a single output going absolutely nowhere.
1458.33 days, 3.99 years
What a tier is not
A tier grants nothing. There is no fee discount, no governance weight, no allocation, no queue position and no protocol behaviour that depends on it. It does not make an artifact worth more, and nobody here will tell you it does. It is a name for a band of depth, and its only job is to make a number easy to say.
02 The arithmetic
Every threshold, and how the elapsed figures are produced.
Days are blocks multiplied by ten minutes. Years divide those days by 365.25. Both are conversions from a nominal block time, and the documentation runs the same arithmetic as a test so the two can never drift apart.
| Index | Name | Threshold, blocks | Days | Years | Blocks from the tier below |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Raw | 0 | 0 | 0 | not applicable |
| 1 | Sheen | 1 008 | 7.00 | 0.02 | 1 008 |
| 2 | Cast | 4 032 | 28.00 | 0.08 | 3 024 |
| 3 | Verdigris | 12 960 | 90.00 | 0.25 | 8 928 |
| 4 | Umber | 26 280 | 182.50 | 0.50 | 13 320 |
| 5 | Bronze | 52 560 | 365.00 | 1.00 | 26 280 |
| 6 | Oxide | 105 120 | 730.00 | 2.00 | 52 560 |
| 7 | Elder | 210 000 | 1458.33 | 3.99 | 104 880 |
Worked edges
Depth 1 007 is still Raw. Depth 1 008 is Sheen. Depth 4 031 is Sheen with one block to go. Depth 209 999 is Oxide, and 210 000 is Elder with no next tier and no blocks to count toward one.
Why the gaps grow
Sheen takes a week. Elder takes four years. The ladder is deliberately not linear, so the early tiers arrive often enough to mean something and the late ones stay rare without anyone rationing them.
03 The catch
A tier is held by an output, and outputs can be spent.
Reaching Elder does not put a mark on you. It puts a number on one unspent output. Spend that output and the tier goes back to Raw on the successor, while the stretch you just finished is engraved as a ring at the depth it reached.
This is why a tier is worth something to look at and not worth trading on. An artifact advertised as Elder is Elder only while nobody moves it. Buying it moves it.
What survives the sale is the ring: a permanent record that this artifact once held an unbroken stretch of 210 000 blocks. The buyer inherits that record and starts their own stretch at zero.
So there are two ways to read an artifact, and both are honest.
The current tier says what is happening now. The ring list says what has already happened and can never be undone. An artifact with three deep rings and a shallow current stretch has a better story than a fresh one at the same tier.