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Spaces are community identifiers; think of them as top-level domains such as ".com", ".org", and ".net". Every Space is represented as a Bitcoin UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output), and can operate millions of decentralized identities underneath called subspaces. There are only about 3600 community spaces released per year, acquired through permissionless auctions on the Bitcoin blockchain.
alice, bob and mike are subspaces or identities within the communities @nostr, @bitcoin and @x
Unlike Bitcoin-themed naming systems such as ones based on RSK and STX, Spaces are Bitcoin UTXOs secured directly by the Bitcoin blockchain and have the following properties:
- Spaces are community identifiers, capped at ~3600 per year, acquired through permissionless auctions on the Bitcoin blockchain.
- Each Space is a community that may operate a registry for issuing Bitcoin identities known as subspaces.
- Spaces AND subspaces (once allocated) are permissionless and as secure as Bitcoin itself! No bridges, slashing, or optimistic security.
- The spaces protocol is designed with zk-light clients in mind making these identities verifiable on resource constrained devices.
- Subspaces do not need to trust the community operator once allocated, and they can do 100% of their transactions on-chain if they wish.
- Minimal on-chain footprint.
For full verification, you can sync the entire spaces protocol with a pruned Bitcoin full node on an old Raspberry PI. Bitcoin is the most secure Proof-of-Work blockchain today, and it's relatively lightweight compared to running an Ethereum node. The majority of ENS integrations trust centralized third-parties defeating the whole purpose of decentralized identities.
| Getting Started | Try Bitcoin Spaces on Testnet4! | coversgetstarted.png | installation.md | |
| Deep Dive | Understand how the protocol works | coversdeepdive.png | auctions.md | |
| Explorer | Checkout the explorer | coversexplorer.png | https://explorer.spacesprotocol.org |
