Glossary

Quick reference for every cross-protocol term.

Attestation

An OC Attest signed envelope. Refers specifically to the OC Attest artifact — NOT to OC Lock envelopes, OC Stamp envelopes, or OC Vote ballots (which we avoid calling "attestations" to keep the vocabulary clean).

Attestation ID

SHA-256(canonical_message) encoded as 64 lowercase hex characters. Content-addressed, deterministic, URL-safe. Two different messages produce different IDs.

BIP-322

Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 322 — the signing scheme every OrangeCheck protocol uses. See BIP-322 signing.

Bond

A declared commitment of sats, expressed via the bond: extension inside a signed canonical message. Verifiers fail with bond_insufficient when the confirmed balance drops below the declared bond, and use the declared value (not the confirmed balance) as sats_bonded for scoring.

Canonical message

The exact UTF-8 text a Bitcoin wallet signs. Seven core lines for OC Attest, LF endings, one trailing LF, optional lexicographically-sorted extensions. Strict by design — see canonical message.

CAP (OC Vote)

cap_sats / cap_days — per-UTXO upper bounds in the sats_days weight mode. Prevents a single massive or ancient UTXO from dominating a tally.

Chain analysis

The practice of clustering, tagging, and correlating Bitcoin addresses via on-chain heuristics. Publishing an OrangeCheck proof exposes the bonded address to chain-analysis linkage. See security — chain analysis.

Challenge (signed-challenge auth)

A short-lived message with header orangecheck-auth and an explicit expires_at. The user signs it with BIP-322 to prove address control in real time. Distinct from an attestation so a signed challenge can never be confused with one.

Commit (OC Vote secret mode)

HMAC(secret, pollId || optionIndex) — a voter's masked choice during the commit phase. Revealed in the reveal phase so the poll's tally can count it.

Conformance vector

A (inputs, expected_output) fixture pinned in a protocol's oc-*-protocol/conformance/ directory. Reference implementations are required to pass them on every CI run. See conformance vectors.

CSRF

Cross-Site Request Forgery — when a malicious site tricks a logged-in user's browser into sending a request to a different site. Defended via SameSite=Lax session cookies plus a Sec-Fetch-Site / Origin check on state-changing auth endpoints.

days_unspent

Integer number of days since the earliest confirmation time among the bonded UTXOs (or, if bond: is present, computed via oldest-first greedy selection). Recomputed from live chain state at verification time.

Device key (OC Lock)

An X25519 keypair representing one client device. Bound to a Bitcoin address via a BIP-322-signed binding statement, published to the kind-30078 directory.

Discovery relay

A Nostr relay queried to find a published artifact (attestation, Lock device record, Stamp envelope, Vote poll) by its addressable tags. Default set ships with each SDK.

Envelope (OC Lock / OC Stamp)

A self-contained JSON blob containing the artifact + signature + metadata. Verifies offline. Formats are per-protocol.

Gate

A server-side policy that either passes or rejects a request based on an OC Attest proof. @orangecheck/gate ships drop-in gates for common Node / edge frameworks.

Handle

A user-facing identifier on an external system — nostr:npub1…, github:alice, dns:example.com, twitter:@alice, etc. Bound inside the signed message as a self-asserted claim.

Identity binding

A protocol:identifier pair bound inside the identities: field of an OC Attest canonical message. Self-asserted — must be verified out-of-band if ownership matters.

Kind 30078

The Nostr event kind the OrangeCheck ecosystem uses for publishing. Parameterized replaceable per NIP-78 (application-specific data). See Nostr kind-30078.

MiCA / VASP / MSB

Regulatory designations for custodial cryptocurrency services: Crypto-Asset Service Provider (EU MiCA 2023/1114), Virtual Asset Service Provider (FATF), Money Services Business (US BSA 31 USC §5330). OrangeCheck is none of these — the protocols sign and verify messages; they never custody, transfer, or convert assets.

Nonce (canonical message)

16 random bytes encoded as 32 lowercase hex characters. Prevents replay — a signature for one nonce cannot be re-used for another.

OTS (OpenTimestamps)

The protocol OC Stamp uses to anchor envelope IDs to Bitcoin block headers. Calendars batch digests into a Merkle tree; the root is committed on-chain; clients upgrade pending proofs to confirmed ones.

Reference score (score_v0)

score_v0 = round(ln(1 + sats_bonded) * (1 + days_unspent / 30), 2)

One registered algorithm for OC Attest. Advisory — gates should use raw metrics.

Relying Party (RP)

The app that consumes a proof and makes a decision. In OrangeCheck, an RP is whatever is gating access.

sats_bonded

Integer satoshis — sum of confirmed, unspent UTXO values at the address, or the declared bond: value if present.

Scheme

The signature scheme used: "bip322" or "legacy". BIP-322 is preferred. legacy is accepted only for P2PKH addresses.

Subject

In /api/check / /api/discover, the thing you're querying about — an address, attestation ID, or bound identity. Every endpoint accepts exactly one subject per request.

Tier

A UI convenience for rendering OC Attest proofs. Four tiers: bronze (10k × 30d), silver (100k × 90d), gold (1M × 180d), platinum (10M × 365d). Thresholds are a suggestion, not protocol.

UTXO

Unspent Transaction Output. The atomic unit of Bitcoin balance. An address's confirmed UTXOs are what sats_bonded sums over.

Verifier

Any app or server that checks a signature and recomputes metrics. The hosted verifier at ochk.io/api/* is one; the SDK's verify() is another; your own server is a third.

Weight mode (OC Vote)

one_per_address / sats / sats_days — how a ballot resolves to a numeric weight in the tally. See weight modes.

Wrench attack

Physical-coercion attack on a cryptocurrency holder. Named after xkcd/538. Relevant because sats_bonded is a public wealth signal; binding large bonds to real-name handles amplifies the risk. See security — wealth advertisement.