Bitcoin Script

Bitcoin Script is a stack-based, intentionally limited scripting language that encodes the conditions under which a transaction output may be spent.

Every Bitcoin output carries a locking script that sets its spending conditions, and an input supplies an unlocking script that must satisfy it. The language is stack-based and deliberately not Turing-complete, avoiding loops to keep validation bounded and predictable. Common patterns include pay-to-public-key-hash and multisig, and Taproot extended what scripts can express. Because scripts are compact opcodes, reading them means decoding. Our Bitcoin archive RPC returns both locking and unlocking scripts per output and input, so you can classify address types and reconstruct spending conditions from historical data.