On January 3rd, 2009, an anonymous computer programmer going under the name Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first block of the Bitcoin blockchain, launching the world’s first fully realized crypto-currency. It was to be a decentralized peer-to-peer digital cash system.
And for years, that is exactly what it was. Anyone in the world could send any amount of Bitcoin they wanted essentially for free and with near instant confirmation. Developers flocked to Bitcoin, business adoption grew, users began spending it for all sorts of goods and services, and the future looked bright.
Unfortunately, either through misinformation or ill intent, Bitcoin was hijacked by a group of developers that wanted to limit Bitcoin’s ability to scale on-chain. In their own words, these developers wanted to create a “fee market” and backlog of transactions on the Bitcoin Core network. They believed Bitcoin was primarily a “store of value” and not digital cash as was outlined in the Satoshi Nakamoto white paper.
This has caused many in the community to create alternative cryptocurrencies as frustration with Bitcoin grew due to increasing fees and transaction times taking longer and longer. As a result Bitcoin lost market share at a staggering rate as people began using other cryptocurrencies.
On August 1st 2017, after years of hostile debate, propaganda, and censorship, Bitcoin underwent two forks: a soft fork and a hard fork. Those in favor of limiting on-chain scaling supported a Segregated Witness soft fork, and those in favor of scaling Bitcoin on-chain as Satoshi intended hard forked. We were left with two versions of Bitcoin: BTC (Bitcoin Core) and BCH (Bitcoin Cash) respectively.
The Nakamoto Studies Institute was created in response to the needs of the Bitcoin Cash community. Much of the original Bitcoin literature and history is still hosted on websites which are openly hostile to the original vision of Satoshi Nakamoto. This includes organizations such as Bitcoin.org and the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute.
Given the increasing hostility of the debates, discussions to change the white paper, and the history of staggering censorship, propaganda, boycotting, theft and subversion that Bitcoin Core inherited, the Nakamoto Studies Institute believes it is no longer prudent to allow these organizations to remain the premiere online resources for this important primary source material.
You discover cryptocurrency and want to learn more about it. You should start by reading the writings of
— Ryan X. Charles (@ryanxcharles) May 21, 2018
Our goal is to curate and organize the best primary and secondary source material available on the history of Bitcoin and it’s future in Bitcoin Cash.
We are grateful to the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute for their full endorsement of this project:
Btw SNI is open source, if you want to fork it and go in a different direction, by all means do so: https://t.co/g0HwNlI05X
— Pierre Rochard (@pierre_rochard) May 19, 2018
Who are We?
Derek Magill — Derek is the founder of NSI, an author, and the head of marketing at Praxis. He writes at derekmagill.com and Tweets @derekmagill.
Contributing to NSI
If you are interested in helping NSI curate and annotate the best primary and secondary source material on Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin, and its future in Bitcoin Cash, please reach out on Twitter @derekmagill.