Dear readers,

I am pleased to announce the return of a great tradition that originally began in 2018. The Satoshi Nakamoto Institute Annual Dinner is back, and we hope you’ll join us for a memorable evening on Thursday, March 12th, 2026, in Austin, TX.

Seating is limited to 100 guests at $350 per ticket, with proceeds supporting SNI’s mission.

The dinner will be held at a premier steakhouse in downtown Austin, coinciding with Bitcoin Takeover week, presented by Bitcoin Park during SXSW. The full week includes a payments summit on Thursday, March 12th, and the main event on Friday, March 13th.

At the dinner, I’ll share our vision for building the SNI Library of Bitcoin, a permanent institution dedicated to preserving and advancing bitcoin knowledge, and how we’re moving forward to make it a reality.

Reserve your seat

I hope to see you in Austin. Beyond the great food, there will be even better company, and you will be part of a tradition in service of a shared vision, building the future together.

Sincerely,
Michael Goldstein
President, Satoshi Nakamoto Institute

Dear bitcoiners,

The Czech novelist Milan Kundera wrote, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Bitcoin is not just software. It’s an idea built on top of many other ideas, from Austrian economics to cryptography to the cypherpunk movement to free software to political philosophy. When someone studies bitcoin seriously, they discover this whole web of thought underneath it. But that web is fragile. Links rot. Documents disappear. Context gets lost. The people who understand why bitcoin was built the way it was won’t be around forever.

This is precisely why institutions like the Library of Congress exist: not just to store documents, but to preserve intellectual heritage so that future generations can access it, learn from it, build on it.

The Satoshi Nakamoto Institute is building the equivalent for bitcoin: a comprehensive, freely accessible archive that places bitcoin in its full historical and intellectual context. Not just Satoshi’s writings, but the entire prehistory: the shoulders of giants that bitcoin stands on, and that we continue to build on today.

I gave a talk on this vision in October called “The Library of Bitcoin”:

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This archive serves anyone seeking a serious understanding of bitcoin. Whether you’re a key holder, a node runner, a miner, a policymaker, an academic researcher, or simply someone who wants to understand the ideas behind bitcoin, the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute provides the information you need.

But serving that mission for generations to come requires more than collecting documents. It requires building institutional-grade archival infrastructure that ensures information survives not just for years, but for decades and beyond. That means adopting the standards that libraries and archives use to maintain integrity and provenance over time. And because we’re bitcoiners, we can go further: we’re implementing OpenTimestamps to cryptographically prove when documents entered the archive, so that future generations can verify they’re receiving the same materials we intended to pass down.

We are now building this technical foundation. It’s not glamorous work, but it’s the work that makes everything else possible. Once the infrastructure is in place, we can expand the collection with more historical, economic, and technical material and add more translations. Anyone in the world who wants to understand bitcoin deeply will have free and open access to the information they need.

Ainsworth Rand Spofford, the man who built the Library of Congress into a true national library, said it should preserve knowledge “not for one generation alone, but for all time.” That’s what we’re working toward: generational knowledge for generational wealth.

This work takes resources. If you believe bitcoin’s ideas deserve to be preserved with the same care we’d give to any great intellectual tradition, I’m asking you to contribute.

The Satoshi Nakamoto Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Your donation is tax-deductible, and with the end of the year approaching, now is a good time to give.

Visit nakamotoinstitute.org/donate today.

Sincerely,
Michael Goldstein
Founder and President, Satoshi Nakamoto Institute

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Take our survey here: https://forms.gle/FHDwzLyL22G6fyuw8

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In Bitcoin, a chain reorganization occurs when nodes discover an alternative chain tip with more accumulated proof-of-work than their current chain tip. The nodes then reorganize their local transaction history to align with this stronger chain, resulting in a different set of confirmed transactions.

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After over a decade of content on the SNI website, the Reorg takes a fresh look at these works in the context of all the proof-of-work since. We’ll provide historical context and contemporary commentary to examine what predictions proved correct and which ideas have been revised or invalidated.

Our first deep dive explores the “SNI Mempool Crash Course in Political Economy,” which laid out our original case for why Bitcoin would out-compete fiat money and precious metals to become the world reserve currency. On episode 1, Pierre Rochard joins in for a discussion of his classic 2013 article “End the Fed: Hoard Bitcoins.”

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or Rumble.

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Happy White Paper Day!

Today, we celebrate White Paper Day. Sixteen years ago, on October 31, 2008, the pseudonymous programmer Satoshi Nakamoto appeared on the Cryptography Mailing List to share his vision for “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.”

Standing on the shoulders of giants, Satoshi became a giant himself, forever changing how we think about money and giving one of the most powerful technologies for protecting property and liberty in human history. For that, we cannot thank him enough.

We encourage you to spend the time to read or re-read “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” and his original announcement, as well as explore the world of ideas from which bitcoin sprung, all available on the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute.

We also invite you to enjoy a video celebrating Satoshi’s brilliant achievement and his forerunners, made by our president, Michael Goldstein a.k.a. bitstein.

What’s New?

Over the past month, efforts at SNI have been focused on continuing to add to our collection of timeless articles and essays on bitcoin, cryptography, economics, and liberty.

Library

“Hermeneutics: An Introduction the Interpretation of Tradition” (1996) by Nick Szabo

Nick Szabo introduces the field of hermeneutics, the interpretation of tradition and texts, and proposes an evolutionary framework for analyzing how cultural traditions develop and propagate over time using algorithmic information theory.

“Objective Versus Intersubjective Truth” (1998) by Nick Szabo

Nick Szabo explores the relationship between objective and intersubjective truth, arguing that evolved traditions contain deep wisdom that can't be easily derived from first principles.

“Smart Contracts: Building Blocks for Digital Markets” (1996) by Nick Szabo

In an early smart contracts essay, Szabo explores how cryptography and software embedded into the world can help enforce and execute contracts, the cryptographic primitives that make this work, and the possibilities these open up for building digital markets.

“Security Without Identification: Card Computers to Make Big Brother Obsolete” (1985) by David Chaum

David Chaum introduces a groundbreaking privacy architecture using digital pseudonyms, blind signatures, and credential systems that enables organizations to verify and process transactions without being able to track or surveil individuals, establishing the cryptographic foundation for privacy-preserving digital commerce.

“Patterns of Integrity: Separation of Duties” (2004) by Nick Szabo

Szabo explores the pattern of “separation of duties” as a fundamental security principle, showing how dividing critical functions between multiple parties — as seen in corporate finance, government branches, and other institutions — prevents abuse of power by requiring multiple entities to collude in order to compromise the system.

“Quorum Systems” (1998) by Nick Szabo

Szabo examines quorum systems for designing multiparty protocols, showing how intersecting sets of participants can achieve Byzantine fault tolerance and secure computation beyond simple majority thresholds, providing a mathematical foundation for distributed trust.

“Interpreting Power: The Principle of Least Authority” (2005) by Nick Szabo

Szabo examines how power and authority are delegated in organizations and governments, arguing that the “principle of least authority” — giving officials no more power than absolutely necessary for their role — is essential for preventing abuse while preserving individual rights and liberties.

“The Mental Accounting Barrier to Micropayments” (1996) by Nick Szabo

Szabo scrutinizes how mental accounting costs, the cognitive burden of evaluating small transactions, create a fundamental barrier to micropayments, arguing that the problem isn’t technical but psychological, as humans struggle to rationally assess the value proposition of frequent tiny payments.

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Mempool

“Bitcoin is Time” (2021) by Gigi

Gigi examines bitcoin’s fundamental relationships with time, and how bitcoin brilliantly uses proof-of-work and its difficulty adjustments to act as a decentralized timestamp server, using the physical to sync the digital and solve the double spending problem in an independently verifiable way.

“Bitcoin is Digital Property” (2022) by Gigi

In another classic article, Gigi explores the world of virtual currency, especially in video games, and how bitcoin’s unique approach using proof-of-work gives us the first money that has true scarcity, both in the digital and the physical world.

Translations

“Steganography No Solution” in Brazilian Portuguese

“Bitcoin Miners Beware: Invalid Blocks Need Not Apply” in Brazilian Portuguese

“Speculative Attack” in Italian

The Satoshi Nakamoto Institute is advancing and preserving bitcoin knowledge. To do so, we rely on the generous contributions of readers like you. If you have gained value from reading and exploring the SNI website, please consider donating to help us continue this mission.

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After finishing our redesign in July, our focus after turned to adding more content to the ever-expanding SNI library. Here are some of the highlights from August and September.

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Library

“The Quality of Money” (2009) by Philipp Bagus

While most analyses of money focus on quantitative concerns, Philipp Bagus focuses on the qualitative properties that make good money.

“Rights, Remedies, and Security Models” (2004) by Nick Szabo

Nick Szabo draws from English common law to think about issues in access and security of computer resources.

“The Coming Jurisdictional Swamp of Global Internetworking” (1994) by Douglas Barnes

In this Cypherpunk-era talk, Douglas Barnes thinks through the implications of anonymous online communications in a digital world of overlapping jurisdictions.

Money: Sound and Unsound (2010) by Joseph T. Salerno

Joseph T. Salerno’s treatise is a thorough examination of what makes money truly sound (based on market choice), and how government intervention leaves money unable to function properly.

“Bitcoin Is Worse Is Better” (2011) by Gwern Branwen

Prolific online researcher Gwern looks at what it took for Bitcoin to come into existence and why its architecture works, even if it makes some cryptographers scratch their heads.

Web version of The Ethics of Money Production (2008)

Jörg Guido Hülsmann’s magnificent book, The Ethics of Money Production, is now available to read online in your browser. This book explores the morality of sound money and the immorality of fiat money. We especially recommend chapter 13, “The Cultural and Spiritual Legacy of Fiat Inflation,” which helps readers understand the common bitcoiner sayings, “bitcoin fixes this” and “fix the money, fix the world.”

“The Beauty of ECash” (1994) by Hal Finney

In an early essay on digital cash, Hal Finney thinks about how different mathematical constructs could be used to make digital cash beautiful and desirable as a collectible.

“Delegation and Agreement Based Certification Policy” (1997) by Nick Szabo

Nick Szabo explores the nuances of trust, delegation, and policy in digital certification systems, proposing a contract-based approach that emphasizes specific, enforceable agreements over vague notions of trust.

“The GNU Manifesto” (1985) by Richard M. Stallman

In his classic manifesto, Richard M. Stallman lays out a defense of his GNU (not Unix!) principles for free software.

“Bitcoin, what took ye so long?” (2011) by Nick Szabo

Nick Szabo explores the social and economic reasons why it may have taken bitcoin so long to develop.

“Bit Gold Markets” (2005) by Nick Szabo

Szabo builds on his Bit Gold concept with some ideas on how a market mechanism could help turn digital stamps (puzzle solution bits) into a fungible currency.

Legal Foundations of a Free Society (2023) by Stephan Kinsella

In this career-spanning collection of essays, Stephan Kinsella offers one of the most thorough treatments of libertarian legal theory, with emphasis on argumentation ethics, the title-transfer theory of contract, estoppel, and intellectual property.

“Steganography No Solution” (1993) by Hal Finney

Hal Finney discusses the limitations of relying solely on cryptography and steganography to achieve digital privacy and freedom, arguing that political action is necessary to overcome potential government restrictions on these technologies.

“Why Remailers I” (1992) by Hal Finney

In this essay from the Cypherpunk mailing list, Hal Finney explains the importance of remailers and anonymous communication technologies for empowering individuals and balancing power between people and large organizations.

“Why Remailers II” (1993) by Hal Finney

In an additional essay on the topic, Finney defends the advantages of anonymous communication, where users can choose what information is given out.

“How to Share a Secret” (1979) by Adi Shamir

In this paper, Adi Shamir introduces his well-known Shamir's secret sharing scheme, which allows a cryptographic secret to be broken into multiple shares that require a quorum to recreate the master secret, with mathematical certainty. Today, this is used by some bitcoin security schemes, such as SLIP-39.

“Introduction to Algorithmic Information Theory” (1996) by Nick Szabo

Nick Szabo gives an introduction to Kolmogorov complexity, which analyzes the mathematics of information, allowing for new ways to look at the transmission of a wide range of phenomena, from computer communications to biology to art to law and tradition.

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Mempool

“Toward a Node World Order” (2022) by Michael Goldstein

In this sprawling essay, Michael Goldstein looks at the fundamental problems in uncertainty that money addresses and how bitcoin nodes create certainty better than any money in history, and further, what this implications this may have on politics and society.

“Bitcoin Miners Beware: Invalid Blocks Need Not Apply” (2018) by StopAndDecrypt

Bitcoin is not a miner democracy, and StopAndDecrypt shows how the bitcoin network, through full nodes, creates an “impenetrable fortress of validation,” that prevents any miner from being able to cheat or change the system.

Translations

• “The Bitcoin Central Bank's Perfect Monetary Policy” in Brazilian Portuguese

• “The libbitcoin Manifesto” in Brazilian Portuguese

• “Digital Cash & Privacy” in Brazilian Portuguese

• “The Quality of Money” in Spanish

• “Toward a Node World Order” in Turkish

• “Toward a Node World Order” in French

• “The Beauty of ECash” in Turkish

Additional Satoshi Emails

As previously announced, public Satoshi emails that had previously been missing from our archives were added.

“Everyone’s a Scammer” Turns 10

In September 2014, SNI president Michael Goldstein, wrote “Everyone’s a Scammer,” which implores people to take seriously the long term implications of holding an undervalued currency expected to take over the global economy. Ten years later, it remains essential bitcoin reading.

The Satoshi Nakamoto Institute is advancing and preserving bitcoin knowledge. To do so, we rely on the generous contributions of readers like you. If you have gained value from reading and exploring the SNI website, please consider donating to help us continue this mission.

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These emails are now available online on our website.

Read the P2P Research List Emails

We would like to thank John Dexter of The Hard Money Project for bringing this to our attention, and Bryan Bishop for providing the archive backup.

Here are some notable quotes from these emails:

On the biggest difference between bitcoin and previous digital cash systems:

Of course, the biggest difference is the lack of a central server. That was the Achilles heel of Chaumian systems; when the central company shut down, so did the currency.
[Link]

On proof-of-work obviating the need for reputation:

[…] Bitcoin does not use reputation at all. It sees the network as just a big crowd and doesn't much care who it talks to or who tells it something, as long as at least one of them relays the information being broadcast around the network. It doesn't care because there's no way to lie to it. Either you tell it crypto proof of something, or it ignores you.
[Link]

And a comment on other “social currencies” that many bitcoiners might not agree with Satoshi about:

I see Bitcoin as a foundation and first step if you want to implement programmable P2P social currencies like Marc's ideas and others discussed here. First you need normal, basic P2P currency working. Once that is established and proven out, dynamic smart money is an easy next step.

I love the idea of virtual, non-geographic communities experimenting with new economic paradigms.
[Link]

We can all certainly share an excitement in the ability for communities to gain financial sovereignty through peer-to-peer electronic cash, and be grateful to Satoshi for building an extraordinary new monetary base layer for the global economy.

We hope you enjoy reading these overlooked emails. If there is other content that you believe is missing or should have its place on the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, please get in touch. You can also help us continue to expand our website by making a tax-deductible donation to our 501(c)(3) organization.

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Today, we are pleased to announce that the new website is now live.

Visit SNI

Our mission is to advance and preserve bitcoin knowledge, which also means making that knowledge as accessible as possible. Given this objective, we are also pleased to kick off this new era of the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute by making available online the entire text of Parker Lewis’s excellent book, Gradually, Then Suddenly.

Read Gradually, Then Suddenly

If you enjoy the book, we encourage you to share it widely. You can also purchase the physical book with bitcoin at the Saif House.

If you like the new aesthetic or have any feedback, let us know. Please report any bugs on GitHub.

We would like to thank all of our donors who made this redesign possible, as well as Skyler at Finite Supply, to whom we owe much gratitude for his extraordinary talent. We would also like to thank Parker Lewis for writing a wonderful book and choosing SNI as the home of the official web version.

The real work begins now.

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We are also pleased to announced that Skyler, who designed the new SNI logo, has agreed to take on this redesign project, to fully bring the aesthetic defined by the logo to life. We highly recommend his talents for anyone in the bitcoin community who needs graphic design work. He has a new bitcoin design agency, Finite Supply, whose mission is to make bitcoin beautiful by crafting excellent logos, websites, and product experiences across the space.

We would like to extend our sincerest appreciation and gratitude to all of our wonderful donors for their contributions towards this successful fundraiser. It is thanks to your gifts that this redesign effort is possible, and we look forward to sharing a beautiful and polished web experience as soon as we can.

This redesign is just the beginning of a new phase for the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute. If you would like to help fund our continuing efforts, please donate via Zaprite, or see our website for how to get involved.

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Bitcoin is global and permissionless, and so should be its knowledge base. We believe that Bitcoin's transformative potential should be accessible to everyone, regardless of their native language. To achieve this goal, we invite you to join our translation community and help us expand our internationalization and localization efforts.

While we already offer content in 14 languages, with varying amounts of material available in each, there is still much work to be done to make seminal texts available to a truly global audience and distribute important knowledge as far and wide as possible.

If you are a multilingual bitcoiner, you can contribute to our initiative in two ways:

1. Add translations directly on GitHub by submitting pull requests

2. Fill out our translation community form to join a more coordinated effort, ensuring consistency in terminology and style across different languages.

Join us in our mission to spread Bitcoin knowledge to every corner of the world. Your contributions, whether through direct translations, by joining our translation community, or through donations to help fund operations and translation efforts, are crucial for making Bitcoin education accessible to people everywhere.

Join our community

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Our new logo, revealed in a previous announcement, was designed by the highly talented bitcoin designer, Skyler, who carefully crafted it to embody a sense of timelessness. Central to our logo is the number 21, a nod to bitcoin’s fixed supply of 21 million. It is from this unwavering monetary policy that bitcoin’s success becomes possible. And while it uses 21st century technology, it is a return to economic principles that date back centuries.

Inspired by printers' marks from the Renaissance era, it pays homage to the transformative impact of the printing press—a technology whose influence reverberates to this day. By tapping into this rich historical tradition, we aim to showcase Bitcoin's place in the lineage of world-changing innovations. We aim to use a printer’s mark with its perennial intention: as a signal of quality in an increasing ocean of noise.

Beyond symbolism, our aesthetic choices serve a vital purpose. We believe that the ideas underpinning Bitcoin are of immense importance and deserve to be treated with the utmost respect. By presenting these concepts in a beautiful, timeless manner, we aim to inspire people to engage with them deeply, learn from them, and pass them on to future generations.

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Our goal is to create a website that not only serves bitcoiners today but will remain relevant and valuable for decades to come. By investing in thoughtful design, we can ensure that the knowledge and insights contained within our site are accessible and appealing to readers now and in the future.

We invite you to support our mission by contributing to our 21 million sats fundraising goal. Your donation will help us create a website worthy of Bitcoin's revolutionary ideas, one that honors the past while educating and inspiring the future for generations to come.

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The Satoshi Nakamoto Institute is pleased to announce that we have achieved tax exemption as a charitable organization from the IRS under Section 501(c)(3). Going forward, your donations to SNI can be claimed for tax deduction, and every satoshi of your contribution will go toward our long-term mission to advance and preserve knowledge of bitcoin's history, economics, and technology.

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The Satoshi Nakamoto Institute was originally founded at block height 272,311 in November 2013. SNI was established out of a need to ensure continued recognition of the Cypherpunk, crypto-anarchist, and other influences on the development of bitcoin, while also further developing a fuller application of Austrian monetary theory to the nascent currency.

Over the past decade, SNI has introduced thousands of readers around the world to the writings of Satoshi Nakamoto, the prescient ideas of notable Cypherpunk writers such as Nick Szabo, Timothy C. May, and Hal Finney, and a deeper appreciation for the monetary properties and implications of bitcoin through exploration of the SNI archives. Many more sats have been stacked, and hodl'd, from the proliferation of ideas originating at SNI, whether that of, “Hyperbitcoinization,” “Speculative Attack,” or “Everyone's a Scammer.”

SNI should not just be a fond memory of the early days of bitcoin, however. As bitcoin continues to grow—and it will—the work of SNI becomes more important than ever. Every new wave of adoption, and every new generation, means more new bitcoiners that need to learn the timeless lessons that our resources have to offer.

To this end, we are now looking at the next decade with a much more active institutional approach. Over the coming months, you will see the seeds of this.

To begin, we are excited to announce a new website has been built and deployed, with more modern web infrastructure. This will allow us to better scale our operations and make it easier to offer more content, including more internationalized content for global accessibility and learning.

Additionally, we have developed a new brand identity that helps set the aesthetic tone for this next phase of the Institute, with a focus on long-term inter-disciplinary bitcoin education. Over time, you will see the website redesigned to embrace this new aesthetic. We also have plans for expansion of the archives and original content. And much more.

We invite you to get involved by contacting us and sharing your ideas, participating in website development on GitHub, subscribing to our updates, and making tax-free donations to help make it all possible.

Thank you for your support.

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