About

A Bitcoin publication that shows its work

We explain how Bitcoin works, cover what happens in it, and document the organisations building it. Every claim is tied to a primary document, and every limit of a claim is stated next to it.

48: evergreen posts
71: sourced news posts
126: organisations documented
106: people profiled

What we do

Three things. We explain how Bitcoin works for people who do not know yet, from what a wallet is to how the fee market decides whether a payment confirms. We cover industry events with the filing, the judgment or the release linked, rather than a summary of a summary. And we maintain a directory of the organisations that build, fund and govern Bitcoin, recording how each one is actually constituted, who is behind it, and where that came from.

They live at Learn, News and Projects.

Why it works this way

Most Bitcoin writing is either marketing or a summary of other writing. Both are cheap to produce and neither can be checked, so a reader has no way to tell a careful claim from a confident one.

The alternative is slower and it is the only thing we sell: go to the document, quote it, link it, and say plainly where it stops. A reader should never have to take our word for anything, and on any page here they can go and look.

How we work

These are rules we hold ourselves to, not aspirations. Most of them are enforced automatically before anything can be published, and the ones that cannot be automated are written down where anyone can hold us to them.

Primary sources, opened

A claim comes from the filing, the judgment, the specification or the registry, and the link goes on the page. Not a search result, not a recollection, not another directory.

Limits stated next to claims

Every explainer says what the thing does NOT do, because that is usually where the misconception is. Every figure carries the date it was true.

Not knowing is an answer

Where we could not establish something, the page says so. In the directory that is a real value, distinct from a positive finding that no legal entity exists, and the two are never conflated.

Serious labels need a finding

An entry is only marked with fraud where a court or a regulator decided it, named on the page. A settlement without admission, an indictment or an allegation does not qualify.

Pseudonyms are left alone

People who publish under a pseudonym are recorded under the name they use, with no attempt to look past it. That includes Satoshi Nakamoto, about whom this site makes no identity claim.

No photographs of people

The directory carries no one's face. Publishing a photograph because it happened to be fetchable is not a decision we make on someone's behalf.

Illustrations are drawn, not generated

Every image is hand-authored SVG from a fixed palette. A generated photograph of an event that did not look like that is a small lie, and a diagram is not.

Both languages, in step

Every post exists in English and Spanish, and a check refuses to let one drift from the other.

Both sides of a live dispute

Where people disagree, we report positions rather than motives, attribute each to something its holder actually published, and give the side we think is losing its strongest version.

What we are not

Stated here because a publication that only lists its strengths is doing marketing.

Not financial advice, and not a recommendation to buy anything. Nobody here is licensed to advise you and nothing here is written as though they were.
Not neutral about accuracy. We take positions on what the evidence supports, and we say when something is contested rather than splitting the difference.
Not comprehensive. The directory covers what we could source, which is not everything that exists, and the library has gaps we know about.
Not currently open source, although we would like to be. The content is openly licensed and the source code is not published today, so we do not claim otherwise.
Not free of relationships. We work with four other projects and take sponsorship, and both are disclosed rather than buried.

Corrections

We get things wrong. When we do, the post is corrected in place and the correction is noted on it rather than quietly edited away, because an unmarked fix asks a reader to trust that nothing else changed either. Entries and profiles carry their sources so anyone can check them, including the person or company they are about.

If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it: get in touch.

Who we work with

WeAreBitcoin is built alongside four other projects. They are named here because a reader deciding how much to trust this site should know who is behind it, and because two of them appear in the directory on this site.

Who is behind it

WeAreBitcoin.org is created and edited by Leon Acosta. Where a post argues a position, it is his, and it is argued from sources you can check rather than from authority.

Licence and reuse

The content is published under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0, so it can be reused with credit under the same terms. Quoted material, third-party logos and the WeAreBitcoin name and logo are excluded, because they are not ours to license.

Sponsorship is accepted on published terms, and everything paid for is labelled as paid for: read them.