Help us build the Library of Bitcoin

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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”:

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