sources/primary — index

Primary records for notes/2026-10-09-origins-timeline.md (Bitcoin's origins, 2007–2011). Everything here was retrieved on 2026-10-09. Full copies are limited to Satoshi Nakamoto's own emails and posts, blockchain records, MIT-licensed source code and a domain registry record. Other people's posts, articles and wiki pages appear in the note as summaries with links only. Where several people wrote in one thread, only Satoshi's messages were kept; each file says what was left out.

Not duplicated. The whitepaper and five Satoshi documents were already saved in sources/satoshi/ by the "Who is Satoshi" job. They are listed below with links to those files rather than saved again.

Times are UTC unless a row says otherwise. File names start with the UTC date.

1. Whitepaper

The live https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf was downloaded again on 2026-10-09 and compared with the repo copy: they are byte-identical (SHA-256 b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553). The metadata date matches the court's finding that Satoshi uploaded a further version on 24 March 2009 (COPA v Wright [2024] EWHC 1198 (Ch) ¶23.9).

2. The Cryptography Mailing List (metzdowd.com), 31 Oct 2008 – 25 Jan 2009: all 18 of Satoshi's emails

Saved from the list's original archive at metzdowd.com (Mailman/pipermail pages), not from a transcription. The archive prints each message's time in US Eastern time; the UTC date used in the file name follows the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute's conversion. The numbers are the SNI's message numbers.

3. The v0.1 release announcement (8 January 2009)

The announcement is email 16 above: 2009-01-08-Satoshi-cryptography-list-16-v0.1-released-metzdowd.html (original archive page). Satoshi announced it again on 13 Feb 2009 to the P2P Foundation's p2p-research list (message 39 in Satoshi-emails-p2p-research-list-2009-SNI.html), and announced the v0.1.2 and v0.1.3 fixes on the bitcoin-list on 11 and 12 Jan 2009 (messages 20 and 22 in Satoshi-emails-bitcoin-list-2008-2010-SNI.html). The release file itself, bitcoin-0.1.0.rar on SourceForge, was not downloaded: it is a Windows executable and archive, not a document.

4. Satoshi Nakamoto Institute archive: other lists and forums

Built from the SNI's published data files (server/data/emails.json, forum_posts.json, forum_threads.json) at commit c412eb84a1d97df9114a6bf4dea300820965c0a7 of https://github.com/NakamotoInstitute/nakamotoinstitute.org, which is the data behind https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/. Three requests replaced about 600 page fetches. Only messages the SNI attributes to Satoshi were kept (satoshi_id set); the other 3,302 forum posts and 33 emails in those threads, by other people, were left out. Each file has a contents table linking every message to its original URL and its SNI page. Image tags in forum posts were replaced with a text placeholder so the files load nothing remotely.

BitcoinTalk shows times in UTC to visitors who are not logged in: the original page for Satoshi's last post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2228.0, fetched 2026-10-09) shows "December 12, 2010, 06:22:33 PM", the same instant as the SNI's 2010-12-12T18:22:33Z. That page also shows the post was last edited by satoshi on "December 13, 2010, 04:45:48 PM".

5. Satoshi's emails to correspondents, published by those correspondents

6. Genesis block and other early blockchain records

Block-explorer records are the JSON returned by Blockstream's public Esplora API (https://blockstream.info/api/), pretty-printed, nothing else changed. They contain block hashes, transaction IDs and public keys and scripts, which are public data, not secrets.

Not saved, cited only: Bitcoin Core src/validation.cpp at the same commit, lines 2336–2338: "Special case for the genesis block, skipping connection of its transactions (its coinbase is unspendable)" (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/c067aa716f8c5b7b1951e47f8d67e6cf0fc14822/src/validation.cpp#L2336).

7. Domain record

8. Read but not saved (copyright): summarised in the note with links

These were read on 2026-10-09 to check dates and facts. They are other people's writing, so the note gives a summary in its own words and a link.

9. Checks made on this folder

• Every metzdowd page was checked: the author line reads "Satoshi Nakamoto" and the date matches the SNI record.
• The SNI files contain only messages with an SNI satoshi_id: 16 + 5 + 2 + 539 = 562. The Hearn file contains only messages whose sender line is Satoshi Nakamoto (16).
• Secrets scan of every file (passwords, WIF-format private keys, 64-character hex): no secrets. The 64-character hex strings in the BitcoinTalk file are proof-of-work difficulty targets; "rpcpassword" appears only in Satoshi's discussion of the setting, with no value. The Gavin email names the alert key but does not contain it.
• The genesis output's address was re-derived here from its public key (SHA-256, RIPEMD-160, Base58Check) and equals 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa, the address explorers display.
• Requests: robots.txt checked for each site; 2 seconds between requests to the same site. The Internet Archive began refusing requests as suspected bot traffic after a handful of lookups, so no more were made there.