License and reuse

This archive holds two kinds of material, and each is handled differently. Editorial readings produced here may be reused with attribution. Preserved primary sources are reproduced for research and archival purposes and are not licensed by Bitcoin Institute at all.

Editorial readings — CC BY 4.0

Articles, analyses, biographies, design documents, currency profiles, editor's notes, the Japanese and English translations of that writing, and the diagrams, charts, and hero illustrations made for it are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, quote, translate, adapt, and redistribute this material, including commercially, on the license's conditions: credit Bitcoin Institute, link to the page you used and to the license, and say so if you changed the material. The grant covers Bitcoin Institute's own writing and figures only: quotations from primary sources and other third-party material inside one of these pages (shown as blockquotes with their attribution) stay under their own rights and are not licensed here.

The recommended citation format for research and journalism is on the How to cite page.

Preserved primary sources — not licensed here

Emails, forum posts, mailing-list messages, Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, court documents, tweets, whitepapers, and other records are preserved here verbatim so that they stay readable even if their original location disappears. Bitcoin Institute claims no copyright in these records and does not license them. Whatever rights exist in a record belong to whoever holds them, typically the original author or publisher; some records are in the public domain or carry a license of their own. Reuse of a primary source is governed by the terms that apply to that source, not by this page.

The Japanese translations of these records, made for this archive, are derivative works of the originals. To the extent Bitcoin Institute holds rights in its own translation work, it licenses that contribution under the same CC BY 4.0 terms as the editorial readings. That grant covers only the translation's own contribution, not the underlying record: reusing a translation also needs whatever permission the original record requires.

Each primary-source entry names its origin in the citation block at the foot of the page, so you can go back to the original record.

The novel and the nonfiction series

The novel Genesis: The Disappearance of the Founder and the Promise and the nonfiction series Satoshi Nakamoto and the 1,000 Days That Made Bitcoin are separately published books. Their text and covers are not part of this archive and are not covered by the licenses above.