Bitcoin YearsHome / Primary sources
The documents Bitcoin’s history is built on, in the order they appeared: Satoshi Nakamoto’s emails and forum posts, the white paper, early software releases, Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, landmark blocks and key technical papers. Each record gives the date, a short summary in our own words and a link to the original source, plus an archived copy where the original is hard to reach.
37 records from 2008 to 2021, 13 of them by Satoshi Nakamoto. The archive grows as new sources are checked.
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Satoshi Nakamoto
The first public appearance of Bitcoin. Satoshi tells the cryptography mailing list about a new electronic cash system that is fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party, and links the paper.
Satoshi Nakamoto
The nine-page paper that describes Bitcoin: transactions signed with digital signatures, a proof-of-work chain of blocks to prevent double spending, and incentives for the nodes that extend it.
Satoshi Nakamoto
Answering the first objection that the design cannot scale, Satoshi argues that ordinary users will not need the full chain: Simplified Payment Verification lets them check payments, and bandwidth costs stay manageable.
Satoshi Nakamoto
Satoshi explains how the proof-of-work chain lets strangers agree on one history without a central authority, using the story of generals who must agree on a time to attack: “The proof-of-work chain is a solution to the Byzantine Generals' Problem.”
Satoshi Nakamoto
The first block of the Bitcoin blockchain. Its coinbase carries a newspaper headline as a timestamp: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”. Its 50 BTC reward can never be spent.
Satoshi Nakamoto
The release announcement of the first Bitcoin software, for Windows. It explains how coins are generated and sent, and sets out the issuance schedule: 21 million coins in total, with the reward halving every four years.
Hal Finney
Hal Finney congratulates Satoshi and works through a thought experiment: if Bitcoin became the dominant payment system, household wealth spread over about 20 million coins would put each one near $10 million.
Hal Finney
Two words on Twitter from the cryptographer who ran the software in its first days, and the best-known record that someone other than Satoshi was running a node.
Satoshi Nakamoto to Hal Finney
Satoshi sends 10 BTC to Hal Finney. It is the first transaction in the blockchain that moves coins from one person to another rather than creating them.
Satoshi Nakamoto
Satoshi argues that electronic money without trusted third parties can succeed where earlier systems failed, and suggests it could start in niches such as reward points, game money, micropayments and pay-to-send email.
Satoshi Nakamoto
Satoshi introduces Bitcoin to the P2P Foundation forum, a wider audience than the cryptography list, framing it as money that works without trusting a central bank or the banks that hold it.
Martti Malmi (sirius-m)
The oldest commit in today's Bitcoin Core repository, from the import of the original code into the project's public version control. Every later change to the software builds on it.
Satoshi Nakamoto
The second release, now for Windows and Linux, with a system tray option, Tor proxy support, coin generation on several processors and faster initial download of the block chain.
Laszlo Hanyecz
Laszlo offers 10,000 BTC to anyone who will have two pizzas delivered to him. Four days later he reports in the same thread that the trade went through, the first widely known purchase of goods with bitcoin.
Satoshi Nakamoto
Satoshi's code change, made within hours, that rejects transactions whose outputs overflow. Nodes that upgraded built a new chain without the bad block, which overtook it the next day.
Jeff Garzik
The first report of the value overflow bug: a transaction in block 74638 created about 184 billion bitcoin out of nothing. The thread follows the fix and the recovery of the chain.
Satoshi Nakamoto
Satoshi writes that attention would have been welcome in any other context, but that WikiLeaks has stirred up trouble and it is heading towards Bitcoin. One of his last public messages.
Satoshi Nakamoto
Satoshi's last post on the forum: release notes for version 0.3.19 with new limits against denial-of-service attacks. After this he wrote only in private emails, then stopped.
Amir Taaki
The document that created Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, the public process through which changes to Bitcoin are proposed, discussed and recorded.
Gavin Andresen
Lets a payment go to the hash of a script instead of the full script, so multisignature and other complex spending rules can use short addresses (the ones starting with 3).
Pieter Wuille
Defines how a wallet derives a whole tree of keys from one seed, so a single backup can restore every address. Nearly every modern wallet is built on it.
Hal Finney
Hal Finney looks back on his part in Bitcoin's first days, from the cryptography list to receiving the first transaction, and writes about living with ALS.
Marek Palatinus and others
The standard behind seed phrases: a list of 12 to 24 words from a fixed word list that encodes a wallet's seed in a form people can write down.
Bitcoin Core developers
The release in which the reference software was renamed from Bitcoin-Qt to Bitcoin Core, to separate the software from the network. It also brought fixes for transaction malleability.
Pieter Wuille and others
A way for miners to signal readiness for several soft forks at once through bits in the block version, with a deadline. SegWit and Taproot were deployed with it or its successors.
Eric Lombrozo, Johnson Lau, Pieter Wuille
Moves signature data into a separate witness structure. This fixes transaction malleability, replaces the block size limit with a block weight limit and opened the way for the Lightning Network.
Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja
The paper behind the Lightning Network: payment channels between users, chained into a network, so payments can move instantly and settle on the blockchain only occasionally. Its last revision (version 0.5.9.2) is dated January 14, 2016.
Bitcoin Core developers
The release that let miners signal for SegWit. The rules would lock in once 95 percent of blocks in a two-week period signalled, and take effect about two weeks after that.
Ava Chow
A common file format for transactions that are built and signed in several steps or by several devices. It is what lets hardware wallets, multisig setups and coordinators work together.
The first block in which the Segregated Witness rules applied, three weeks after the block size dispute had produced the Bitcoin Cash split.
Bitcoin Core developers
The full disclosure of a bug in Bitcoin Core 0.14 to 0.16.2 that could have allowed inflation through a duplicated input. It was fixed in 0.16.3, and as far as is known it was never exploited.
Pieter Wuille, Jonas Nick, Tim Ruffing
Introduces Schnorr signatures to Bitcoin: smaller and simpler than the original signatures, and able to combine several signers into one signature.
Pieter Wuille, Jonas Nick, Anthony Towns
The core of the Taproot upgrade: an output can be spent with one key, or with one of many hidden scripts, and only the path actually used is revealed.
Pieter Wuille, Jonas Nick, Anthony Towns
The scripting rules that apply inside Taproot outputs, including changes that make signature checking easier to batch and leave room for future upgrades.
Pieter Wuille
The address format used by Taproot (addresses starting with bc1p), a corrected version of the original bech32 encoding.
Bitcoin Core developers
The release that let miners signal for Taproot over about three months. With 90 percent of blocks in one two-week period signalling, the rules would apply from block 709,632.
The first block in which the Taproot rules applied, Bitcoin's first major upgrade since SegWit.
Only primary sources are listed: the original email, forum post, code commit, release note, proposal, paper or block, not articles about them. Every record was opened and checked against its source before it was added. Dates are as given by the source, in UTC where a time is shown. Summaries are our own; quotes are kept short, and the full text always stays with the original.
Archived copies point to faithful mirrors such as the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute when the original is offline or hard to read. Know a source that belongs here, or spotted an error? Write to [email protected].
The list is also available as data: primary-sources.json.