Bitcoin

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2008 · A cryptography mailing list, where Satoshi Nakamoto posted the white paper; the network itself started in January 2009 · Also known as BTC; ₿; bitcoin (lower case for the coin itself); Satoshi's coin

What it is

Bitcoin is a kind of money that exists only as entries in a shared record kept by thousands of computers around the world, with no bank or government in charge. People hold it using secret codes called keys, and if they lose the key, the money's gone for good. New coins come from 'mining', where computers compete to solve maths puzzles, which uses a lot of electricity. Its price swung wildly and people argued about it constantly.

Where it came from

On 31 October 2008, someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto posted a short paper describing it to a cryptography mailing list. The network started on 3 January 2009, with a newspaper headline about a second bank bailout written into its first block. Early users were programmers and hobbyists on forums such as Bitcointalk. Nakamoto stopped posting around 2010 and has never been identified. It reached a wider public through Silk Road, a dark web drug market that took only bitcoin from 2011, and then through news coverage of every price spike and crash.

How people used it

A few people bought things with it, starting with Laszlo Hanyecz paying ₿10,000 for two Papa John's pizzas on 22 May 2010, now marked every year as Bitcoin Pizza Day. Most people held it and posted about holding it. Believers gave their profile pictures glowing red laser eyes, told doubters 'have fun staying poor' and answered every crash with 'HODL'. Doubters posted that it was a bubble or a scam, and fans kept a running count of how many times the press had declared it dead.

Why it mattered

It was the first coin, and thousands of later ones, from Dogecoin to the NFT boom, copied either its design or its pitch. For believers it was a protest against banks after the 2008 crash and also a way to get rich, and the culture never settled which of those mattered more. It came with its own slang and holidays, and with real losses: the Mt. Gox exchange collapsed in 2014 after losing hundreds of thousands of customers' coins. El Salvador made it legal tender in 2021, then backed away in 2025.

The jokes around it

• HODL: a 2013 Bitcointalk post titled 'I AM HODLING', a drunk typo of 'holding', became the word for never selling.
• Bitcoin Pizza Day (22 May): people repost the two pizzas and work out what the ₿10,000 would be worth now.
• Laser eyes: in 2021 fans edited glowing red eyes onto their profile pictures as a pledge to keep them until the price hit a target.
• 'Have fun staying poor': the stock reply to anyone who doubted it.
• 'Bitcoin is dead': the headline the press kept writing, which fans collected and counted every time the price recovered.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People turned a piece of software into a cause, with a founding story, a vanished founder and its own holidays, while checking the price every hour. Belief and greed sat in the same posts, and no one online felt they had to choose between them.

What noah is not sure of

The HODL post is usually dated 18 December 2013, but I haven't checked the exact day. The Mt. Gox loss is commonly given as about 850,000 coins, some later found; the specimen's claim that US authorities 'seized' Mt. Gox in May 2013 looks wrong, as they seized funds from an account linked to it. El Salvador's 2025 change reportedly made accepting bitcoin voluntary rather than fully revoking it. The laser eyes target is usually given as $100,000.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.