Abstract
A single unspent transaction output (UTXO) on a Bitcoin-style ledger is made to hold one suspended process of a small stack-machine. The UTXO’s locking script contains a fixed interpreter for a 28-instruction bytecode, derived from Koopman’s Canonical Stack Machine, and a data tail holding the program, the program counter, two stacks, a memory image, an output log and a timestamp. Anyone may spend the UTXO. The spend is valid only if the new output carries byte-identical code plus the state advanced by up to K instructions, and if the spender takes no more than a reward that grows with the time elapsed since the previous cycle, measured from the transaction’s nLockTime. Illegal operations halt the machine and return its funds rather than invalidating the transaction, so no program can freeze its own escrow. An extension lets programs demand witness values from the spender, reject wrong values at the consensus layer, release escrowed bounties to the party that supplied correct values, end a cycle early so that a multi-instruction stage executes atomically, and bind a commitment to the eventual payee’s address so that a revealed answer cannot be copied out of the mempool by a third party.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Chan, Jerry D., "K17: a UTXO-chained stack machine with a liveness auction and witness-verified bounties on Bitcoin SV", Technical Disclosure Commons, (October 20, 2026)
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/12327
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