About Bitcoin Archive
Mission
Bitcoin Archive aims to be the world's most comprehensive and accurate archive of Satoshi Nakamoto's complete conversations and related historical documents.
Scope
- 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
- Aftermath — Court testimonies, blog retrospectives, interviews, media reports, and key historical events in Bitcoin's early history
- Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) — Key protocol specifications that shaped Bitcoin's development, including HD wallets, SegWit, Taproot, and more
Policy
- Historical facts only — No speculation, no opinion
- Sources required — Every entry must cite its original source with a verifiable URL
- Accuracy — Content is verified against original archives
- 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, or letter) is archived as a single entry. One document equals one entry. Aftermath entries (retrospectives, media reports, court testimonies) each represent a single event or article.
- Thread structure — Related messages are grouped into threads. Each message remains an individual entry, linked by a shared thread identifier. Participants listed on each entry reflect only the direct conversation partners (author and respondent), not all thread participants.
- Biographies — Biographical profiles of key participants are compiled from multiple public sources and displayed on each participant'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:
- Cryptography Mailing List (metzdowd.com)
- Bitcoin-list Mailing List (sourceforge.net)
- BitcoinTalk Forum
- P2P Foundation
- SourceForge Bitcoin Releases
- Bitcoin Whitepaper (bitcoin.org)
- Martti Malmi's Satoshi Email Archive
- Gwern's Archive (Wei Dai / Satoshi Nakamoto emails)
- Bitcoin Magazine (Adam Back / Satoshi Nakamoto emails)
- Mike Hearn's Published Satoshi Emails (plan99.net)
- COPA v Wright Trial Evidence
- Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs)
- Satoshi Nakamoto Institute (secondary reference)
Contributing
This is an open source project. Contributions are welcome via GitHub.