Every row carries an evidence grade and, where one exists, a command that regenerates
it. Rows we cannot verify are shown too, marked NOT HELD — because a timeline showing
only what was found looks complete when it is not.
This timeline is incomplete, and says so on purpose.
It currently holds 70 events. It is a deliberate subset of unpublished research rather than a bulk export — each row has to acquire a grade, a source and a reproduction path before it can appear here. The material behind it is not published, and its extent is deliberately not characterised: a figure nobody can verify is not evidence.
Absence of a row here is not evidence that nothing happened on that date.
Applying the same standard to ourselves that we apply to everyone else — literally, since
7 of these rows are about a second Bitcoin, mined in
2026, and they are graded by the same table and carry a NOT HELD of their own.
2009 pairSERVER-DB
e-cash.org is registered — the earliest domain date in the register
e-cash.org is registered, a month before bitcoin.org.
reproduceno mechanical reproduction — this row rests on a document
caveatsEarliest verifiable domain date in the project's orbit. A registration is not an attribution.
2009 pairADJUDICATEDNOT HELD
An August 2008 draft existed — title and abstract survive; the FILE does not
A draft titled "Electronic Cash Without a Trusted Third Party" was linked, not attached, to Adam Back on 20 Aug 2008 and Wei Dai on 22 Aug 2008. Its title, full abstract and Hashcash citation at [5] are preserved verbatim inside Back's witness statement. Back downloaded it, later searched for it, and swore he could not find it.
evidence & reproduction
First Witness Statement of Dr Adam Back, 17 July 2023 — §5 quotes Satoshi's email in full (title, abstract, Hashcash at [5]); §6 'I believe I did download the paper at the time'; §7 b-money 'was not mentioned in the pre-release draft he sent me'; §11 'I don't think I have a copy … I haven't been able to find one from the checks I have made' COPA v Wright [2024] EWHC 1198 (Ch), Exhibit AB1 / witness statement C/9
Wei Dai to Bird & Bird, Oct 2023: the three published emails are the entirety of his communications with Satoshi COPA v Wright, trial disclosure — https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/ch/2024/1198
abstract text as preserved (hash of the text, not of the file) First Witness Statement of Dr Adam Back, 17 July 2023, COPA v Wright — reproduced at https://github.com/lugaxker/nakamoto-archive 6dd156197af8ee359d0852a236997e843b2f8e39a20ca326d17883420d82d9bd
reproduceno mechanical reproduction — this row rests on a document
caveatsNOT LOCATED, and now closed against both named recipients by their own sworn or published words. What is lost is the FILE - the bytes, and whatever the body said between abstract and references. What survives is adjudicated: the title, the complete abstract, the Hashcash citation at [5], and sworn confirmation from its only known reader that b-money was absent. No hash of the file exists anywhere, so a recovered candidate could never be verified cryptographically - only by those four discriminators plus custody. A reconstruction built from the correspondence is already in circulation and would pass the wording tests by construction; the reference numbering is the discriminator that matters.
2009 pairSERVER-DB
netcoin.org is registered the day before bitcoin.org, same registrar
netcoin.org is registered through AnonymousSpeech one day before bitcoin.org, at the same registrar.
reproduceno mechanical reproduction — this row rests on a document
caveatsEstablishes the identifier sequence anonymousspeech -> vistomail -> gmx, not the reverse.
2009 pairARCHIVE-POS
The file id Satoshi linked is bracketed to within days by an unrelated crawl
Satoshi emailed a LINK, not an attachment, to Adam Back on 20 Aug 2008 and Wei Dai on 22 Aug 2008: upload.ae/file/6157/ecash-pdf.html. That host's file ids are sequential, and the Internet Archive crawled it through 2008 for unrelated reasons. Ids 6145, 6160 and 6161 - immediately either side of 6157 - were all first captured on 23 August 2008, placing 6157's upload on or before that date.
Satoshi's emails quoting the URL (Exhibit AB1; Wei Dai correspondence) First Witness Statement of Dr Adam Back, 17 July 2023, COPA v Wright — reproduced at https://github.com/lugaxker/nakamoto-archive
reproducecurl -s 'http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=upload.ae&matchType=domain&output=json&from=2008&to=2010&fl=timestamp,original&limit=40000' # use a HIGH limit; at 8000 the neighbours truncate away
caveatsCorroborates TIMING only. It does not recover the file, say anything about its contents, or identify who uploaded it. Its value is that the bracketing party had no interest in the question: the Internet Archive crawled an Emirati file host in 2008 for its own reasons. Note also that it captured 6145, 6160 and 6161 that day and never captured 6157 - consistent with an unlisted upload whose URL travelled only by private email, though a crawl gap has many innocent causes. The file itself was never archived and structurally could not be: the download sat behind a form POST, which crawlers do not submit.
2009 pairCAPTURE
The November 2008 pre-release carries its own genesis nTime
The pre-release codebase hard-codes a genesis block time of 2008-09-10 18:02:08 — nearly four months before the live genesis block.
reproduceno mechanical reproduction — this row rests on a document
caveatsAn integer the code sets about itself — no headline, no external commitment, so it anchors nothing outside the file. Contrast the live genesis, which embeds a newspaper front page and therefore cannot predate it.
2009 pairCAPTURE
The 3 October 2008 pre-release draft exists
A pre-release whitepaper PDF is created; we hold the bytes, and its two /ID halves are equal, meaning it was never re-saved after creation.
reproducecurl -sL 'https://web.archive.org/web/20140320135003id_/https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf' -o c.pdf; sha256sum c.pdf # any copy of the 3 Oct 2008 draft must be 427c63b364c6db91…
caveats/CreationDate D:20081003134958-07'00'. The offset is the producing machine's setting, not a location.
2009 pairSERVER-DB
The SourceForge account nakamoto2 is created
User ID 2238460 joins SourceForge, five weeks before registering the Bitcoin project.
reproduceno mechanical reproduction — this row rests on a document
caveatsGRADED 'SELF' DELIBERATELY: a PGP creation date is written by the creating machine and is trivially forgeable. Period-plausible, entirely unbinding — and no Satoshi artifact was ever PGP-signed with it.
2009 pairSELF
The PGP key of the 2008–2010 Satoshi Nakamoto asserts its own creation date
The key served as Satoshi_Nakamoto.asc from bitcoin.org — DSA primary with an ElGamal subkey, user ID "Satoshi Nakamoto <satoshin@gmx.com>", fingerprint DE4E FCA3 E1AB 9E41 CE96 CECB 18C0 9E86 5EC9 48A1 — carries a self-asserted creation timestamp of 2008-10-30 18:19:19 UTC in its own key packet, and the Version header reads GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32).
SELF is the weakest grade on this page, and this row is the reason it exists. A PGP creation timestamp is written by whoever generated the key, from their own clock, and can be set to anything. It is NOT evidence that the key was made on that date. What is independently checked is only this: a key bearing that timestamp was served from bitcoin.org, was captured there, and is byte-identical to the copy held in a separate third-party archive.
reproduceFetch the .asc above, strip the armour, base64-decode, and read the OpenPGP packets: tag 6 (public key) and tag 14 (subkey) each begin with version byte 0x04 followed by a 4-byte big-endian creation time. Both decode to 1225390759 = 2008-10-30 18:19:19 UTC. The v4 fingerprint is SHA-1 over 0x99 || 2-byte length || packet body.
caveatsThe user ID already carries satoshin@gmx.com — the address on the March 2009 whitepaper — rather than the satoshi@vistomail.com of the August 2008 emails. Timing against the 31 October 2008 announcement is deliberately NOT stated as a finding here: one side of that comparison is self-asserted, so the interval is not a measurement.
2009 pairARCHIVE-POS
The whitepaper is announced to the cryptography list
satoshi@vistomail.com posts 'Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper' to cryptography@metzdowd.com.
caveatsThe +0800 offset is the mail provider's server clock, not a location — see the +0800 verdict. Message-ID is CHILKAT-MID-...@server123, a server-side library.
2009 pairPARTY-RELEASED
The 183,697-byte draft is in third-party hands by 8 November 2008
A correspondent states he received the 183,697-byte bitcoin.pdf on this date — the same byte-length as the pre-release draft we hold.
reproducesha256sum <your copy of the 3 Oct 2008 draft> # the hash StealthMonger published and Dillinger confirmed: 427c63b364c6db914cf23072a09ffd53ee078397b7c6ab2d604e12865a982faa
caveatsIndependent provenance for the pre-release draft, from people who held it in 2008 and published a matching hash years later.
2009 pairSERVER-DB
The Bitcoin project is registered on SourceForge
Account nakamoto2 registers the project; s_nakamoto and hal are added later.
caveatsWritten by SourceForge's own database. The subject could not set it.
2009 pairADJUDICATEDNOT HELD
The 11 November 2008 whitepaper is created — WE DO NOT HOLD IT, BUT WE CAN NOW RECOGNISE IT
A whitepaper version is created at this exact second. It is the version the public could obtain in January 2009. We do not have the file -- but its MD5 and SHA256 are published in a court expert report, so any candidate copy can be tested against them.
reproduceno mechanical reproduction — this row rests on a document
caveatsSTILL THE PRINCIPAL OPEN ITEM as an artifact -- but no longer an open-ended search. PM3 §45 records that as of the report, searching those hashes returned nothing, while the control copies' hashes returned many results. So a hash search today is a new test, not a repeat. PM3 also finds BWP-NB1 is neither in the disclosure dataset nor among the archive-sourced copies: a genuinely distinct file. VERIFIED 7 Aug 2026: both hashes were re-read from the original Appendix PM3 PDF and are present verbatim -- the SHA256 is a contiguous 64-character string. (A page header falls between the 'SHA256:' label and its value in the extracted layout, which is what prompted the earlier caution; the value itself is unbroken.) The source is a court document, quoted and cited rather than re-hosted, so there is no public reproduce script for it.
2009 pairPARTY-RELEASED
The pre-release codebase is dated
A Bitcoin codebase predating any public release is dated 15 November 2008 and is distributed with a published MD5.
reproduceno mechanical reproduction — this row rests on a document
caveatsCAUTION: SNI's .tgz is labelled 'Compressed by SNI' — a REPACKAGING, not original bytes. It will not hash to anything Satoshi produced, and must never be cited as an original artifact. Their .rar carries a published MD5; that is the one to check against.
2009 pairARCHIVE-POS
The venue closes — and the 52-day silence is explained
Moderator Perry E. Metzger ends the Bitcoin discussion 4h19m after Satoshi's last post. The silence that follows is a moderated list being moderated, not a withdrawal.
caveatsSourceForge's own feed shows two accounts under one hand's control. It does not say whose hand.
2009 pairNONENOT HELD
No key has ever signed anything — the ceiling on all of this
No genesis-era or Patoshi private key has ever produced a verifying signature. Every identity fact on this timeline is forensic, archival, adjudicated or party-released. None is cryptographic.
reproduceno mechanical reproduction — this row rests on a document
caveatsThis is a property of the world, not a gap in the research. Only a signature would change it. Recorded as a row so the timeline cannot be read as answering 'who'.
2009 pairCHAIN
The genesis block
Block 0 is mined, embedding The Times headline of 3 January 2009.
evidence & reproduction
block 0, hash 000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f the Bitcoin blockchain
reproduceany full node, or bigquery-public-data.crypto_bitcoin.blocks WHERE number = 0
caveatsThe only unforgeable line on this list. Forging it would require redoing the proof-of-work.
2009 pairARCHIVE-POS
Bitcoin v0.1 is announced
satoshi@vistomail.com posts 'Bitcoin v0.1 released' to the cryptography list.
reproducedownload the attachment from the bitcoin-list archive at satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org and sha256sum it
caveatsMailing-list attachments live in a URL namespace separate from message bodies and are in none of our text corpora. Of 129 archived attachments on that list, this is the ONLY one from 2009.
2009 pairCAPTURE
The released bitcoin.exe is linked — two days AFTER v0.1.0 was announced
The Windows binary in the archive distributed everywhere as bitcoin-0.1.0.rar carries PE TimeDateStamp 1231629360 = 2009-01-10 23:16:00 UTC. v0.1 was announced on 8 January, so this binary cannot be in the release of the 8th: the archive is v0.1.1.
caveatsA linker-written field. MinGW toolchain, and notably no build-path leak - nothing about the machine escaped into the binary. The 0.1.0 -> 0.1.1 delta is irc.cpp and serialize.h, both networking: main.cpp, main.h and script.cpp are dated 7 January and untouched, so every consensus rule and the genesis are unaffected. Only the label was wrong, and it was inherited from the ecosystem rather than read off the bytes.
2009 pairCAPTURE
Hal Finney tweets 'Running bitcoin'
The best-known third-party record of the network acquiring a second participant.
caveatsWidely attributed to Satoshi sending Hal Finney. The chain shows the transaction, not the names.
2009 pairSERVER-DB
The v0.1 release announcement on SourceForge — byline erased
SourceForge carries the full v0.1 release announcement, including the instruction that generated coins must wait 120 blocks to mature. A platform migration replaced the author with 'Anonymous'.
caveatsThe text is theirs; the attribution is gone, which is why no compilation folds it in. It independently corroborates the 120-block maturity we derived from main.cpp — COINBASE_MATURITY + 20 — in Satoshi's own words.
2009 pairCHAIN
Block 593 — a 50 BTC send with change
50 BTC is split into two 25s; one output returns to the input address, so this is a payment with change, not a split between two parties.
caveatsAn earlier reading of ours called this support for a 'first transfer of 25.00' account. The full transaction reverses the direction; the erratum is recorded in entry 45 §10(k).
2009 pairADJUDICATED
A member of the public downloads the whitepaper
The retired solicitor Nicholas Bohm, reading the cryptography list, downloads the whitepaper. His copy's creation date is 11 November 2008.
reproduceno mechanical reproduction — this row rests on a document
caveatsThis is what fixes the 11 November version as what the public could actually get in January 2009.
2009 pairADJUDICATEDNOT HELD
Pre-release builds bc014 / bc014a / bc015 / bc015a — NOT LOCATED
Satoshi sends links to at least four pre-release Bitcoin builds between the public v0.1.3 and v0.1.5. The URLs are in disclosed correspondence; the payloads are not located.
reproduceno mechanical reproduction — this row rests on a document
caveatsNOT LOCATED, which is not the same as destroyed. They were also sent as mail attachments, so the likeliest surviving copy is inside Bohm's Thunderbird profile rather than on any web archive.
2009 pairCHAIN
100 BTC is sent to Nicholas Bohm
Exactly one payment of exactly 100 BTC exists in a 1,501-block window, at the minute and address Bohm's own 2009 email quotes.
evidence & reproduction
block 2616, tx 7d73200e...db6fc3d5, to 1CHE5JRfc5mr8ZtVUP7nnsS5HC4bWcXoc6 the Bitcoin blockchain
reproduceno mechanical reproduction — this row rests on a document
caveatsSeven weeks earlier than the canonical PDF, which had been the earliest gmx attestation.
2009 pairCHAIN
The first transaction fees ever paid — a self-test
Block 2817 collects 2.01 BTC across three transactions (1.00, 1.00, 0.01), all with the same address on every input and output: someone moving 1 BTC to themselves three times.
reproduceno mechanical reproduction — this row rests on a document
caveatsDate offset is +0000 here against +0800 on vistomail — the offset tracks the provider. The Mozilla Message-ID's embedded Unix timestamp decodes to the Date header exactly, an authenticity check but NOT a location check.
2009 pairSELF
The P2P Foundation profile posts
Three posts appear on the P2P Foundation profile in February 2009. The profile's 'Male, Japan' field is self-entered.
reproduceno mechanical reproduction — this row rests on a document
caveatsThe two addresses ran IN PARALLEL for about a month: gmx privately from 3 February, vistomail publicly to 4 March. A clean single-changeover story is wrong.
2009 pairCAPTURE
The canonical whitepaper is created
The whitepaper as served today is created. We hold its bytes from three independent sources, all identical.
reproducepython verify/whitepaper_from_chain.py out.pdf; sha256sum out.pdf # carves the canonical out of block 230009 -> b1674191a88ec5cd…
caveatsMadden's court expert report §180 publishes this file's MD5 and SHA256; both match our bytes. Four independent paths, one hash.
2009 pairCHAIN
A private miner's own block, identified
Block 14047 pays a coinbase of 50.10 — the +50.10 Bohm wrote to Satoshi about, his 15:58 being BST. Only eight blocks in all of 2009 collected any fee.
caveats[forensic], not [cryptographic] — they signed nothing. Predicted from the letter before the chain was queried. The coinbase address received that one coinbase and nothing else, and was emptied 28 Dec 2011.
2009 pairCHAIN
The 0.01 that carried a message
The only payment of any size in a three-day window is exactly 0.01 BTC — matching a reported receipt of 1 June 2009 03:59 BST.
caveatsThe transaction is identified; THE SENDER IS NOT. The sending address traces to block 11,583, which is not in the Patoshi cluster. We looked for corroboration and did not find it.
2009 pairSERVER-DB
Martti Malmi commits to the repository
sirius-m commits revision 2 — the first contributor other than Satoshi.
Recovered activity from the lost forum — October 2009
Four dated threads from the un-archived bitcoin.sourceforge.net forum survive because Satoshi reposted them verbatim to BitcoinTalk, preserving their original timestamps and usernames: 1 Oct 14:12, 8 Oct 05:49, 15 Oct 19:58 and 22 Oct 02:36 UTC.
reproduceno mechanical reproduction — this row rests on a document
caveatsThe old timestamps are QUOTED TEXT in a repost, not server records -- graded accordingly. Only the threads Satoshi chose to carry across survive, so this is a curated sample selected by the subject, never a representative one. The preserved date format 'Thu 01 of Oct, 2009 (14:12 UTC)' is TikiWiki's, which is evidence about what the lost board ran.
2009 pairSERVER-DB
The first of 164 SVN commits
s_nakamoto begins committing to SourceForge SVN; commit times are written by the server.
caveatsThe densest record of Satoshi working that exists off-chain.
2009 pairNONENOT HELD
Satoshi's SourceForge tracker comments — THE PREMISE IS UNSUPPORTED
Other archives list Satoshi's SourceForge tracker comments as a known omission. SourceForge's own public API shows the project has no tracker mount at all, and no crawl contains one.
CDX: 6,000 URLs under sourceforge.net/tracker/ reference Bitcoin zero times; modern /bugs and /feature-requests namespaces return zero archived URLs https://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/
sourceforge.net/rest/p/bitcoin lists 8 tools — support, summary, reviews, code, mailman, files, news, activity — and no bugs/tickets/tracker mount https://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/
caveatsRecorded as a gap because the claim circulates, but the evidence points at there being nothing to recover rather than something lost. CAVEAT: this is the CURRENT migrated tool set; a tool used in 2009 and later removed would not appear, so this lowers the probability sharply without reducing it to zero.
caveats539 posts are publicly enumerable; the profile counts 575, so 36 are counted but not listed.
2009 pairADJUDICATEDNOT HELD
The pre-BitcoinTalk forum — SATOSHI'S OWN VENUE, NOT ARCHIVED
Satoshi ran a web forum at bitcoin.sourceforge.net/boards/ before launching the successor forum on 22 November 2009, naming the old URL in their own announcement. No capture of it survives.
caveatsA Satoshi venue absent from every compilation we have checked. NOT ARCHIVED is not the same as destroyed. The remaining route is reconstruction from the 'Repost:' threads they carried across.
2009 pairSERVER-DB
nakamoto2 drops off the SourceForge project, and the paper's folder is renamed
Between 28 November 2009 and 8 January 2010 three fields on the Bitcoin SourceForge project page changed: the owner list went from 'nakamoto2, s_nakamoto' to 's_nakamoto' alone, the development stage moved Alpha to Beta, and the whitepaper's folder was renamed from 'Research Paper' to 'Design Paper'.
caveatsRecords what the page said, not who changed it or why. A name leaving an owner list is a page edit - it does not establish that the account was deleted or abandoned, and Satoshi's own last machine-verifiable activity is separately dated nearly a year later. The three changes share a 41-day bracket, which is consistent with one editing session and does not prove one. The window cannot be narrowed further: no capture of the files page exists between those two dates.
2009 pairCAPTURE
The earliest surviving capture of the whitepaper as served
The Internet Archive captures bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf; the bytes are identical to the file served today.
reproducebigquery-public-data.crypto_bitcoin.transactions WHERE block_number = 74638
caveatsThe only time Bitcoin's supply rule has been broken in production.
2009 pairCHAIN
An example address printed in the 2009 Bitcoin client's UI begins receiving real coin
1NS17iag9jJgTHD1VXjvLCEnZuQ3rJED9L is a hard-coded placeholder in the Send Coins dialog of the January 2009 client (v0.1.0 src/uibase.cpp line 495, unchanged in v0.1.3). On the 2009 chain it received its first payment on 2010-09-10, has since received 102 payments totalling 900.85217683 BTC, and has never spent a single satoshi. Its largest single receipt is 777.00000000 BTC in block 104662, 2011-01-26.
This is an address Satoshi published as example text in a form label — not a wallet, and not a holding. WHO, IF ANYONE, HOLDS ITS PRIVATE KEY IS UNKNOWN, and nothing here suggests Satoshi did. The first payment arrives twenty months after the source was published, so the coin was sent by strangers who read the address out of the code. Published in source, funded by others, never spent.
reproducecurl -s https://blockstream.info/api/address/1NS17iag9jJgTHD1VXjvLCEnZuQ3rJED9L and read chain_stats: funded_txo_sum 90085217683, spent_txo_sum 0. Page the full history with /txs/chain and sort by status.block_height; the earliest confirmed receipt is at height 79021.
caveatsNot decidable for the November 2008 pre-release: that artifact is five files (main.cpp, main.h, node.cpp, node.h, readme.txt) and contains no UI source at all, so the string can be neither confirmed nor denied there. The earliest artifact carrying it is v0.1.0.
caveatsThe 2014 'I am not Dorian Nakamoto' post is 3 years 3 months later, unsigned, and binds to nobody. The precise claim is that the last VERIFIABLE action is this one.
2009 pairSERVER-DB
gavinandresen is added to the Bitcoin SourceForge project
The project's owner field reads 's_nakamoto' alone in the capture of 27 December 2010 and 'gavinandresen, s_nakamoto' in the capture of 21 January 2011. No capture of any sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin URL exists between those dates, so the change is bracketed to 25 days and no tighter.
caveatsRecords a MEMBERSHIP CHANGE, not a handover. SourceForge admins can add members and the page shows the result, not the actor - it cannot establish that Satoshi added him. It also does not narrow Satoshi's departure: their last machine-verifiable action is separately dated to 15 December 2010, and this row adds nothing to that. The adjacency is recorded precisely because it is the kind of fact that becomes a narrative if left uncaptioned.
2009 pairCAPTURE
bitcoin.org serves Satoshi_Nakamoto.asc
The PGP public key is served from bitcoin.org, byte-identical to the copy the Nakamoto Institute distributes.
reproduceno mechanical reproduction — this row rests on a document
caveatsRecovered from the Wayback Machine after nakamotostudies.org itself went to a domain-parking stub — the publisher is gone, the content survives.
2009 pairNONE
'I am not Dorian Nakamoto' — unauthenticated
The P2P Foundation account posts a denial, 3 years 3 months after the last verifiable activity.
reproduceno mechanical reproduction — this row rests on a document
caveatsGRADED 'NONE'. No signature, and nothing binds it to whoever held the account in 2009. This is exactly why the precise claim is 'the last machine-verifiable action is 15 December 2010', not 'Satoshi's last communication'.
2009 pairADJUDICATED
Hal Finney dies
The first person to run the software besides Satoshi dies, having been asked about the earliest draft and not answered.
reproducesha256sum <your copy of the 3 Oct 2008 draft> # matches the hash published in the Jan 2015 thread: 427c63b364c6db914cf23072a09ffd53ee078397b7c6ab2d604e12865a982faa
caveatsTwo people who held the file in 2008 confirmed the hash independently, in 2015 and 2017.
2009 pairSERVER-DB
The SourceForge file tree is purged
The project drops to a single 102-byte README.txt pointing at GitHub; the original release files stop being served.
reproduceno mechanical reproduction — this row rests on a document
caveatsPrimary hosting decays. It is why this project mirrors rather than links — and why two of the secondary sources cited by other Satoshi archives are already dead.
2009 pairPARTY-RELEASED
An original 2008 participant confirms the pre-release hash
Ray Dillinger, a participant in the original November 2008 discussion, confirms the recirculated draft: "Yes. The hash matches. That's definitely it."
reproducesha256sum <your copy of the 3 Oct 2008 draft> # the hash Dillinger confirmed in Aug 2017: 427c63b364c6db914cf23072a09ffd53ee078397b7c6ab2d604e12865a982faa
caveatsNine years after the fact, by someone who held the original. Testimony about a hash is much stronger than testimony about a document, because the hash is checkable and the memory is not load-bearing.
2009 pairADJUDICATED
A court expert publishes the missing whitepaper's hashes
Madden's Appendix PM3 publishes the MD5 and SHA256 of BWP-NB1, the 11 November 2008 whitepaper supplied from Nicholas Bohm's exhibit, and records that neither hash returned any internet result.
reproduceno mechanical reproduction — this row rests on a document
caveatsTurns the whitepaper hunt from an open-ended search into a decidable test. Also note what it does NOT give: a hash lets you recognise the file, never reconstruct it.
2009 pairADJUDICATED
A court judgment states the 2009 transaction count
The COPA v Wright judgment records that there were just 219 non-coinbase transactions in the 32,489 blocks created up to the end of 2009 — the same figure our independent query returns.
caveatsIndependent confirmation from an adjudicated source. Recorded also because we held this document while believing the count was unpublished — the figure was in our own archive and we did not connect it.
2026 — a second pair, documented to the same standard
Everything above concerns the Bitcoin that launched in January 2009 and the pseudonym that
released it. Everything below concerns a different chain and a different author: a second
Bitcoin genesis, mined in August 2026 by the same January 2009 client, on its own network, with
its own signed releases. It is not a fork of the chain above and shares no history, no balances
and no units with it.
The rows are graded by the same table, and it does not flatter them. Six of the seven are
PARTY-RELEASED — our own record of our own runs, the
same grade this timeline gives Satoshi’s own releases. Exactly one reaches
CHAIN, and it earns that on the 2009 chain rather than on ours. One
is marked NOT HELD against us.
Which of the two chains “is” Bitcoin has no factual answer — only
convention, so neither is ranked here. What can be compared is the evidence, and that
comparison runs in an unexpected direction: no key from 2009 has ever signed anything, while every
artifact below is hashed, timestamped and anchored. The 2026 pair is not offered as a rival. It
is a control — what a fully documented origin looks like, which is what makes the gaps above
measurable.
2026 pairPARTY-RELEASED
Two unmodified 2009 binaries mine and relay a block on the historical genesis
Two copies of the released January 2009 bitcoin.exe (fbcac071…), in network-isolated VMs discovering each other over the client's own hard-coded IRC path, re-derive genesis 000000000019d668…; one mines block 1 at real difficulty 1 and the other validates and accepts it, ending with byte-identical block files.
reproduceno mechanical reproduction — this row rests on a document
caveatsGraded PARTY-RELEASED, not CHAIN: this is our own record of our own run. What a reader can check independently is the binary's hash and that the genesis it re-derives is the real one. It establishes behaviour of the 2009 client, and nothing about who wrote it.
2026 pairPARTY-RELEASED
The 2009 client performs a real chain reorganisation
Partitioned, the two nodes mine competing chains; on reconnect the shorter node's unmodified binary fires *** REORGANIZE ***, orphans its own valid block and adopts the longer chain, both converging on tip 000000004e442b… at height 15.
reproduceno mechanical reproduction — this row rests on a document
caveatsThe losing node retains its orphan rather than discarding it - an exact +223-byte on-disk delta, one v0.1 block. Difficulty never left 1, so nothing here measures hashrate or difficulty dynamics.
2026 pairPARTY-RELEASED
A second Bitcoin genesis is mined, on a chain of its own
Genesis 00000000ad12f3ecd9b14e4276ac98936fb0d658f05dce95ad35d18fceee208a is mined at difficulty 1 by the released January 2009 client, its coinbase quoting The Times of 3 August 2026 - a separate chain, network magic f00ba726, not interoperable with the 2009 one.
reproducepython derivatives/bitcoin/net.py # re-derives the genesis from its parameters
caveatsNot the 2009 chain and not a fork of it: its own genesis, its own network, no inherited balances, and its units are not historical satoshis. NOT money - no premine, no sale, no value assigned. The coinbase headline is a newspaper front page of that day, which fixes the earliest date the block can have been made; the OpenTimestamps row fixes the latest.
2026 pairPARTY-RELEASED
A matured coinbase is spent and relayed — and maturity is 120 blocks, not 100
Transaction f4309c… spends a coinbase that matured under the client's own rule - main.h sets COINBASE_MATURITY = 100 but main.cpp:544 withholds a generated coin for twenty blocks beyond it - created on one node, accepted by the other across the wire, and mined into block 00000000b4ca03f9… at height 122.
reproduceno mechanical reproduction — this row rests on a document
caveatsThe 100-vs-120 discrepancy is a property of the 2009 source, not of this run: the constant and the code that uses it disagree, and the code wins. Value transfer on the unmodified 2009 client is executed here rather than modelled - on a chain where the value is zero.
2026 pairPARTY-RELEASED
A published Bitcoin client is shown to have mined its own chain's blocks
Blocks 2, 3 and 4 of the 2026 chain were produced by bitcoin-0.1.3 (c3f15fc5…), the client published under that tag; block 4 sits inside a 39-minute window bracketed by before-and-after captures sharing one PID and one process start time.
caveatsWhat the binding establishes is that a process running a binary of a known hash was alive before and after the block's timestamp - NOT that this process mined this block. No artifact can tie a nonce to a PID. A narrow bracket is a stronger statement than a wide one; it is not a proof. The same claim this project makes about Satoshi's fbcac071…, made about ours, at the same strength and with the same limit stated.
2026 pairNONENOT HELD
The chain outruns its evidence set — NOT YET SEALED
The sealed evidence set for the 2026 chain stops at block 4. Block 5 was mined at this timestamp and the chain has continued past it; every block beyond 4 has no published findings, no hash manifest and no binding record. This row deliberately names no current height — the height moves, the gap is what persists.
caveatsMarked NOT HELD against ourselves, on the same rule applied to everyone else on this page: the event demonstrably happened and we do not hold the artifact in publishable form. Graded NONE because a status file we generate is not independent support for our own chain. The reproduce command reads the live height rather than this row asserting one, so the row cannot go stale while the miner runs. It will be upgraded when the blocks are captured and sealed, and not before.
2026 pairCHAIN
The 2026 chain's release is anchored in the 2009 chain
The Bitcoin-v0.1.4 release artifacts are committed to Bitcoin block 961652 (00000000000000000000b286970ddbb501ced552e95c7ceda6ab92cf0f44fdbc) through OpenTimestamps, proving they existed no later than that block.
reproduceots verify bitcoin-0.1.4.tar.gz.ots # or walk the proof and match block 961652's merkle root
caveatsThe only 2026 row graded CHAIN, and it earns it on the 2009 chain rather than on ours - the proof is backed by mainnet proof-of-work, not by us. It fixes the LATEST date these artifacts can have; the newspaper in the 2026 coinbase fixes the earliest. This project declines to treat the satoshin@gmx.com key's self-asserted 2008 date as evidence, so it anchors its own artifacts rather than asking for a weaker ruler than it hands everyone else.
Grades, strongest first.CHAIN — written into the blockchain; forging it would mean redoing the proof-of-work.
SERVER-DB — a timestamp written by a third party's database, not by the subject.
ADJUDICATED — tested in court.
PARTY-RELEASED — published by a named counterparty from their own records.
ARCHIVE-POS — position in an archive, independently bracketed.
CAPTURE — a third-party crawl with its own clock.
SELF — Satoshi's own unsigned assertion; trivially fakeable.
Nothing here is cryptographic. No genesis-era or Patoshi key has ever produced a
verifying signature, so no row on this timeline identifies a person. That is a fact about the world,
not a gap in the research — and only a signature would change it.
Generated 2026-09-09 from events.json. The page is a function of that file.