About Bitcoin Institute

Mission

Bitcoin Institute aims to be the definitive reference for understanding Satoshi Nakamoto — primary sources from the cypherpunks era through the post-Satoshi years, and editorial readings that connect them.

Origin

Bitcoin Institute began as the companion archive to Genesis — The Vanished Founder and the Promise, a work of historical fiction. In the novel, Misaki founds the Bitcoin Institute. Outside the novel, Bitcoin Institute is a real, working project: it preserves primary sources and publishes its editors' readings of them.

The readings on this site are written in the voice of Misaki, the founder in the novel. She is a fictional character, not a real researcher or author.

Scope

Primary sources

At the center are the emails and posts Satoshi Nakamoto wrote. Beyond those, the site holds records from the cypherpunk years before Satoshi appeared through the years after he left. The English originals are kept as they are, and the Japanese pages carry translations. There are eight types:

Forum Post — Posts on BitcoinTalk and the P2P Foundation. This type also covers discussion of Bitcoin Core's development on GitHub (bug reports and proposed changes)
Mailing List — Posts to the Cryptography Mailing List, the Cypherpunks Mailing List, Bitcoin-list, and the P2P Research List
Private Correspondence — Emails between Satoshi and specific correspondents, including Martti Malmi, Adam Back, Wei Dai, Mike Hearn, and Hal Finney
Whitepaper — The paper that first set out how Bitcoin works. Both the first version, released on October 31, 2008, and the revision of March 24, 2009, are preserved word for word. The first version's PDF itself gives a creation date of October 3, 2008, four weeks before its release
BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) — Documents that propose changes or additions to Bitcoin's specification. Among them are the major proposals behind HD wallets, SegWit, and Taproot
Web Document — Writings and pages that people involved in Bitcoin's history published on their own sites, preserved word for word. Examples: Nick Szabo's bit gold, Wei Dai's b-money
Tweet — Historically significant posts on X (formerly Twitter), preserved word for word together with the name of the account that posted them
Court Document — Testimony and judgments. Example: COPA v Wright

Editorial readings

Writing by Bitcoin Institute's editors on the subjects the site covers, in six types:

Article — Interpret a primary source or an event, from events that took a single day to episodes that unfolded over years. Some articles take up the recollections of people who were there, or media coverage
Analysis — Weigh several sources against each other to work through a single question
Biography — Set out what the records show of one person's life
Design Document — Explain Bitcoin's design. There is a page that surveys the whole system, and pages on its parts, such as consensus, monetary design, cryptography, and data storage
Altcoin / Stablecoin — Take up one altcoin or stablecoin at a time and compare its design with Bitcoin's: how much is issued, how agreement is reached, who runs it and how, and how the first coins were allocated
Guide — Explain how the technology works to readers with no background, illustrated with everyday analogies instead of technical diagrams

Under “By Type” in the menu, every type is listed, grouped into editorial readings and primary sources. The By Type page puts the same types in a single list, sorted by number of entries or by name.

How to use

How to find records, and how to follow links to the records related to them, is explained on How to use this site.

Policy

Core principles

No editorial opinion in primary sources — Primary-source entries (emails, forum posts, BIPs, court documents, and others) preserve the content faithfully, with no editorial speculation or interpretation added
Editorial readings are marked as interpretation — Editorial readings say plainly that they are interpretation, and each claim rests on a source
Sources required — Every entry gives the source of the original with a URL that can be checked
Accuracy — Content is checked against the original records at their sources

Detailed rules

Keeping content — Once content is added, it stays even if the original page can no longer be viewed. Source URLs are recorded as they were when the content was added, and some may no longer work.
Multiple sources — Where possible, entries also cite another site that carries the same record (e.g., the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute), so that the record can still be read if a link breaks.
Timestamps — All dates and times are in UTC. The Cryptography Mailing List archive shows times in US Eastern Time (EDT/EST), so they have been converted to UTC. BitcoinTalk already shows times in UTC. Where only the date is known (web documents, court documents, and others), the time is given as 00:00:00 UTC. For times, the site relies mainly on the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute's timestamps, which it has converted to UTC.
Names in Japanese — In the Japanese edition, people's names are written in katakana (the Japanese script used for foreign names) throughout the interface and the editorial text. Quotations, source titles, organization names, brand names, handles, URLs, and the like may keep their original-language forms.
One document, one entry — Each primary-source document, whether a mailing-list post, a forum post, a private email, or a court document, is one entry (one page). The scope of an editorial reading depends on its type: an article covers one event or episode, an analysis covers a question that spans several sources, and a design document covers either the whole system or one part of it, such as consensus or cryptography.
Thread structure — Messages linked by replies are grouped into a thread. Each message stays a separate entry, marked as belonging to the same thread, and the thread page lets you read them together. On a primary-source page, “Figures” lists only the writer and the people they corresponded with directly (such as the recipient of an email), not everyone who took part in the thread.
Biographies — Profiles of the major figures are compiled from several public sources and shown on each figure's page. Every fact in a profile comes with a source URL that can be checked.
License — Editorial readings are published under CC BY 4.0. Preserved primary sources are reproduced for research and preservation and are not licensed by Bitcoin Institute; the rights belong to their respective holders. Details are on the License and reuse page.

Sources

Primary sources are gathered from publicly available archives and sites. The main ones are listed below. Every source is on the By Source list, with a description of each and the records taken from it.

Citations

The recommended citation format is on the How to cite this site page. The same page lists the source code and other sources that the technical readings rely on, each fixed to a specific version.

Contact and corrections

To report an error in a transcription, a translation, or an editorial reading, open an issue on GitHub with the URL of the page and how it should be corrected. Other feedback is welcome there too.