I run LearnBitcoin, a free site with long sourced reads on how Bitcoin works and what has happened to it. We have just put the history on one page as a timeline: 61 dated events from the whitepaper to this year.
https://www.learnbitcoin.com/historyThe part I want to show this forum is the sourcing, because a lot of the record is here. Every date on the line was checked against something we could open and link: the mailing list email, the block, the forum post, the court filing, the commit. Thirty of the 61 sources are the originals, eighteen are archive copies of originals, nine are official records and four are press reports where nothing better exists. If we could not source an event, it is not on the line.
Checking turned up three mistakes in our own pages, all now corrected and logged:
- We had the first release on 9 January 2009. The announcement email says 8 January.
- We gave the 2010 value overflow total as 184,467,440,737.09551616 BTC. The dump of block 74638 in the thread that first reported it shows two outputs of 92233720368.54275808, so the total was 0.01 BTC lower, which is why the sum came out at minus 0.01 BTC once it overflowed.
- We dated El Salvador's 2025 change to the law to the month it passed. It took effect ninety days after publication, at the end of April.
A few of the oldest events lean on posts from this forum, read through archive copies where the original addresses have changed. If you were there for any of it and our date or our telling is off, I would like to hear it. Corrections go on a public page with credit.
If we are missing something you think belongs on the timeline please let us know!
