On July 11, 2010, Slashdot published an article titled “Bitcoin Releases Version 0.3,” covering the v0.3 release five days earlier. It was not the first time a major technology outlet had written about Bitcoin: InfoWorld had given it four paragraphs in a May 24 roundup of open-source projects, and when Satoshi pointed Wikipedia editors to press coverage nine days after the Slashdot post, he named “the infoworld and slashdot ones” together. What Slashdot did that InfoWorld had not was send a crowd.
The “Slashdot effect” was immediate and dramatic. SourceForge counted 624 downloads of the Bitcoin software in all of June 2010, then 755 on July 11 alone and 4,253 on July 12. July ended at 14,094, more than twenty times June; no earlier month had passed 700. The exchange price rose roughly tenfold over the following five days, according to the Bitcoin Wiki’s history page, and new users flooded the network. Among them was Jeff Garzik, who later recalled discovering Bitcoin through this very post — “the Great Slashdotting” — and went on to become one of its top three code contributors.
The sudden influx of users tested the network’s capacity, exposing scalability limitations that had previously been theoretical. Satoshi and other developers worked to optimize the software, addressing bandwidth constraints, memory management, and transaction processing bottlenecks.
The Slashdot article also attracted unwanted attention. Along with curious technologists came speculators, critics, and — as events would soon prove — attackers.
That attention reached Wikipedia as well. The English Wikipedia article on Bitcoin had been up since March 8, 2009, and nothing in its edit history until then had raised deletion. Edits began arriving at 21:30 UTC on July 11, the day of the Slashdot post, and at 04:42 UTC the next morning an editor proposed the article for deletion. Another editor removed the proposal within the hour. On July 14 the first editor opened a formal deletion discussion, giving the reason “No notable third-party coverage.” About an hour later, a BitcoinTalk user started a thread asking the forum to save the article.
It was in that thread that Satoshi named the InfoWorld and Slashdot coverage. “The timing is strange,” he wrote on July 20, “just as we are getting a rapid increase in 3rd party coverage after getting slashdotted.” The discussion closed on July 30 with the result “Delete”: the closing editor judged the arguments about the lack of significant third-party coverage to be stronger than the arguments for keeping it. Two months later, Satoshi suggested that any new article be “a very brief, single paragraph article like 100 words or less that simply identifies what Bitcoin is.”
One month after the Slashdot post, the network would face its most serious crisis: the value overflow incident of August 15, 2010.
