The bitcoin whitepaper is the original blueprint of Satoshi Nakamoto’s (who is not Craig Wright) Bitcoin reference implementation – and by that, we mean BTC, not the hard-fork Bitcoin SV. The scholarly article has been cited by hundreds of academic papers on the subject of cryptocurrency and blockchain. So given that it’s studied by many people, it’s reasonable to leave it out in the open for the public to view, similar to other technological breakthroughs such as Wikipedia, the Tor specification, or even the example.com page.
But what happens when someone tries to block these documents and pages? Clearly, that would be censorship. This is what Craig Wright is doing to the bitcoin.org administration in an attempt to stop people from viewing the bitcoin whitepaper.
Craig Wright seems to have a problem with people hosting the bitcoin whitepaper, especially with Bitcoin.org. We’re not sure why he dislikes its hosting so much.
Things Have Gone To A Climax
Up until now, nobody really took his repeated threats to stop hosting the whitepaper seriously until he sued pseudonymous Bitcoin.org domain operator Cobra last February. Since Cobra chose not to reveal his identity during the court hearing, which is required in order to make a legal defense, the judge made a default judgment in Wright’s favor. He ordered Cobra to block UK users from viewing the bitcoin whitepaper on Bitcoin.org. Additionally, the judge said Cobra must pay damages to Wright.
We understand that Cobra has concerns about revealing his identity for Wright to see since he’ll simply harass Cobra more. But something has to be done about Bitcoin.org’s embargoing of not only the whitepaper but Bitcoin Core downloads as well – something that was not mentioned in the court order.
Direct Links
So, in the interest of preserving the free availability of the bitcoin whitepaper, we, with the help of the bitcointalk.org community, have gathered a list of alternative locations where it continues to be hosted. All of these are direct links to the PDF file.
- US Congressman Patrick McHenry’s website
- US Congressman Tom Emmer’s website
- Square’s website
- Government of Estonia’s website
- Novi’s website
- Paradigm’s website
- Coin Center’s website
- Trezor’s website
- Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA)’s website
- Fidelity Digital Assets’ website
- USSC’s website
- satoshinakamoto.me
- NYDIG
- sachinmeier.com
- craigwrightisnotsatoshi.com
- easy-bitcoin.io
Mirrors on decentralized, distributed file-sharing platforms such as IPFS, Skynet, and Arweave are also available. A copy of the whitepaper was also found on ReasearchGate uploaded by the Satoshi Nakamoto author pseudonym. We ourselves are also hosting a mirror which you can view here.
In this tweet, Jameson Lopp posts a shell script that downloads the whitepaper copy that has been embedded on the blockchain:
It should be noted that since Bitcoin.org is also blocking UK users from downloading Bitcoin Core, we have made the files available on our site as well.