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← Timeline pdf · 2013
pdf P2FMS ✓ Verified on-chain

Bitcoin whitepaper (PDF)

Written to the chain on 06 Apr 2013, block 230,009.

Block
230,009
Written
06 Apr 2013
Size
184,292 B
Format
PDF
Transactions
1

About this artifact

Bitcoin's founding document, stored inside Bitcoin itself. The 184,292-byte PDF was split across the fake public-key fields of a bare-multisig transaction in 2013 — a technique that burns the coins it uses, so the sender paid real money to make the paper as permanent as the ledger it describes. Every full node has carried a copy ever since, whether or not its operator knows.

How it was stored

Bare multisig outputs list several public keys and say how many signatures are needed to spend them. Uploaders discovered that the public-key slots could carry arbitrary bytes. A transaction can include many such multisig outputs, each carrying one or more fake key-sized chunks.

More about P2FMS
Proof · 1 transaction

Verified against the chain

Every byte shown here was read from these transactions. Open one in a block explorer to check it yourself.