{"document_id":"BLC-PAPER-0001","slug":"bitcoin","title":"Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System","authors":"Satoshi Nakamoto","year":2008,"date_label":"31 October 2008, the date of the cryptography mailing-list post. The PDF fetched from bitcoin.org does not print that date on the first page.","publisher":"Satoshi Nakamoto","paper_type":"Design paper","category":"Digital cash","topics":["Digital cash","Proof of work","Double spend"],"source_url":"https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf","source_label":"bitcoin.org","legacy_pdf_path":"/pdf/bitcoin.pdf","sha256":"b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553","sha256_note":"SHA-256 of the PDF fetched from https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf on 1 October 2026 (184,292 bytes). This is not a hash of the historic library file at /pdf/bitcoin.pdf. That file is not stored in this build and was not byte-compared.","version":"File served by bitcoin.org on 1 October 2026","doi":null,"rights_status":"Rights uncertain","source_status":"Official source, and a historic library path","use_status":"Download from the publisher. The legacy path remains. Full text is not republished here.","licence":null,"licence_label":"No licence notice on the first page of the file fetched from bitcoin.org. Not marked public domain.","full_text":null,"full_text_reason":"Full text is not published on this page. Public availability is not a licence to republish a document. Blockchain Lab has not recorded a licence that permits an HTML transcription, a training set, or a retrieval corpus of the paper. Text on this page is Blockchain Lab's own wording, or a pointer to a study that is also Blockchain Lab's wording.","editorial_line":"The paper proposes that a public chain of hash-linked blocks, and a race to spend computation, can order electronic-cash payments without a bank in the middle.","canonical_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/bitcoin","record_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/bitcoin","study_url":null,"last_reviewed":"2026-10-01","last_checked":"2026-10-01","relationships":[{"rel":"Proposes","label":"Proof of work","href":"/learn/concepts/proof-of-work"},{"rel":"Proposes","label":"Settlement without a bank in the middle","href":"/learn/concepts/settlement"},{"rel":"Later design in this library","label":"Lightning channels","href":"/whitepaper/lightning"},{"rel":"Later design in this library","label":"Ethereum white paper","href":"/research/corpus/papers/ethereum"},{"rel":"Different consensus, not an implementation","label":"Ouroboros","href":"/whitepaper/ouroboros"},{"rel":"Different architecture","label":"Interledger","href":"/research/corpus/papers/interledger"},{"rel":"Different architecture","label":"Corda: An Introduction","href":"/research/corpus/papers/corda"}]}