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 Disappearance of the Founder and the Promise, a work of historical fiction. In the novel, Misaki establishes the Bitcoin Institute. The archive you are reading is a real open-source project: it preserves primary records and publishes editorial readings based on them.

The novel's Misaki is the fictional founder and the source of the archive's editorial voice. This is a relationship between a work of fiction and a public project, not a claim that Misaki is a real researcher or author.

Scope

Primary sources

Satoshi Nakamoto's writings — All emails, forum posts, and code comments
Conversations — Exchanges with Adam Back, Wei Dai, Hal Finney, James A. Donald, and others
Blog posts and essays — A participant's own self-published web writings (blog posts, essays), preserved verbatim — e.g. Nick Szabo's bit gold, Wei Dai's b-money
Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) — Key protocol specifications that shaped Bitcoin's development, including HD wallets, SegWit, Taproot, and more
Tweets (X / Twitter) — Historically significant X (formerly Twitter) posts archived verbatim with the original handle. Edited commentary about each tweet lives in a separate editorial article that links to the primary tweet entry.
Court documents — Trial evidence and testimony, e.g. the COPA v Wright case
The Bitcoin whitepaper — Both the October 31, 2008 final PDF and its October 3, 2008 pre-release draft, archived verbatim

Editorial readings

Bitcoin Institute's own writing about the archive's material, in five forms:

Articles — Read a primary record, event, or multi-year incident in the archive: retrospectives, media coverage, and key historical accounts from Bitcoin's early history
Analyses — Develop interpretive arguments across multiple sources
Biographies — Compile a person's documented history
Design documents — Walk through a specific mechanism in Bitcoin's protocol design, from the system overview down to individual subsystems such as consensus, monetary policy, cryptography, and storage
Currencies — Profile a single altcoin or stablecoin's protocol design — supply, consensus, governance, initial distribution — read against Bitcoin as the baseline

Every form listed here — primary sources and editorial readings alike — can be browsed from the header's Browse menu, under By Type.

Policy

Core principles

No editorial voice in primary entries — Primary entries (emails, forum posts, BIPs, court records) preserve the source content verbatim, with no editorial speculation or interpretation added
Interpretation in editorial readings — Editorial readings are explicitly labeled as interpretation, with each claim cited to its source
Sources required — Every entry must cite its original source with a verifiable URL
Accuracy — Content is verified against original archives

Detailed rules

Content preservation — Once archived, content is permanently retained even if the original source becomes unavailable. Source URLs reflect the location at the time of archival and may no longer be accessible.
Multiple sources — Where possible, entries cite secondary sources (e.g., Satoshi Nakamoto Institute) to provide redundancy against link rot.
Timestamps — All dates and times are in UTC. Timestamps from the cryptography mailing list (displayed in EDT/EST by the Mailman archiver) have been converted to UTC. BitcoinTalk forum timestamps are UTC by default. Where only a date is known (e.g., blog posts, court proceedings), the time is recorded as 00:00:00 UTC. The Satoshi Nakamoto Institute's UTC-normalized timestamps are used as the primary reference.
Names in translation — In the Japanese edition, person names are normalized to katakana in UI and editorial text for consistency. Quotes, source titles, organization names, brand names, handles, and URLs retain their original-language forms where appropriate.
Entry granularity — Each primary source document (email, forum post, letter, or court record) is archived as a single entry. One document equals one entry. Editorial entries range in scope from a single event (an article) to a cross-source argument (an analysis) or an entire subsystem (a design document).
Thread structure — Related messages are grouped into threads. Each message remains an individual entry, linked by a shared thread identifier. Figures listed on each entry reflect only the direct conversation partners (author and respondent), not all thread figures.
Biographies — Biographical profiles of key figures are compiled from multiple public sources and displayed on each figure's page. All facts cited in biographies are backed by verifiable source URLs listed in the entry's references.

Sources

Content is sourced from publicly available archives:

Citations

For the recommended citation format and the fixed-source map for technical readings, see How to cite this archive.

Contributing

This is an open source project. Contributions are welcome via GitHub.