Research corpus Digital cashBLC-PAPER-0001

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

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.

Rights uncertain
Design paper
Official source, and a historic library path

Compare

Record

Authors: Satoshi Nakamoto
Date: 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
Version: File served by bitcoin.org on 1 October 2026
Document ID: BLC-PAPER-0001
DOI: None recorded
Last reviewed: 1 October 2026
Licence: No licence notice on the first page of the file fetched from bitcoin.org. Not marked public domain.

SHA-256 b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553SHA-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.

Direct answer

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.

It is a design for peer-to-peer cash. It is not a design for general contracts, private payments, or a company.

Why it is in the corpus

It names double-spending and answers with a public history that is expensive to rewrite, not with a trusted issuer.
The right to add a block is bought with work anyone can check. The miner's legal identity is not the rule.
Later documents in this library either sit on that chain, reject the work rule, or reject a single global chain.

Where to read

Official source — bitcoin.org
Legacy library pathThe old URL stays. It is served from the Internet Archive copy of the previous site.

Download from the publisher. The legacy path remains. Full text is not republished here.

Full text

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.

Claims and assumptions

Blockchain Lab's reading of what the document is doing. Not a quotation and not the source text.

Payments can be ordered by a peer network instead of a financial institution.
The chain is the public record of which spend came first.
A node can leave and return by accepting the chain with the most work.

Assumptions

An honest majority of computing power. The argument is that rewriting history costs more than it pays, not that rewriting is impossible.
A network that actually delivers blocks.
Users who verify, or who have chosen to trust someone who does.

What changed

The live Bitcoin software, the block-size arguments, and later channel designs are not this PDF. This library's Lightning reading is a later design for payments that try not to touch the chain on every transfer.

Relationships

ProposesProof of work
ProposesSettlement without a bank in the middle
Later design in this libraryLightning channels
Later design in this libraryEthereum white paper
Different consensus, not an implementationOuroboros
Different architectureInterledger
Different architectureCorda: An Introduction

Construct with this

A pattern link for people designing a system. It is not a claim that this paper is a product specification, and it is not permission to copy anyone’s code.

Cite this record

These citations point at the source document. They are not a licence to copy it.

Author–date

Nakamoto, S. (2008). Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. Satoshi Nakamoto. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

BibTeX

@techreport{bitcoin2008,
  title = {Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System},
  author = {Satoshi Nakamoto},
  year = {2008},
  institution = {Satoshi Nakamoto},
  url = {https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf},
  note = {Rights status: Rights uncertain. Blockchain Lab record: https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/bitcoin}
}

RIS

TY  - RPRT
TI  - Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
AU  - Satoshi Nakamoto
PY  - 2008
PB  - Satoshi Nakamoto
UR  - https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
N1  - Rights status: Rights uncertain
ER  -

CSL-JSON

[
  {
    "type": "report",
    "id": "BLC-PAPER-0001",
    "title": "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System",
    "author": [
      {
        "literal": "Satoshi Nakamoto"
      }
    ],
    "issued": {
      "date-parts": [
        [
          2008
        ]
      ]
    },
    "publisher": "Satoshi Nakamoto",
    "URL": "https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf",
    "note": "Rights status: Rights uncertain. Not a licence to republish the paper."
  }
]

JSON BibTeX file RIS file CSL-JSON

Rights record

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.
Rights: Rights uncertain
Training and retrieval: Not permitted from this site. There is no rights-cleared full text to retrieve or to train on.

Rights and licensing Corrections