How the catalog is built.

The Bitcoin Annotated is built on two commitments: every entry is sourced to verifiable primary documents, and every artifact stands as its own editorial work. This page documents how the catalog is organized and how decisions get made.

Types

Every entry is one of four types. The taxonomy is deliberately narrow: it forces the editorial question what kind of artifact is this before the entry gets drafted.

Phrase

A line of language that the culture adopted — a motto, a rallying cry, an inside joke that hardened into shorthand. Stay humble, stack sats. Vires in numeris. Tick tock, next block.

Event

A moment that the culture remembers. The Pizza, the Cyprus crisis, the Mt. Gox collapse, the ETF approval. Events are dated to the day they happened, not to the day they became famous.

Iconography

The catalog's visual artifacts. The orange, the symbol, the laser eyes, the wojak. Objects whose work is visual before it is verbal.

Document

A text that the culture treats as a source. The whitepaper, the cypherpunk manifesto, the Hal Finney "running bitcoin" tweet, books that survived.

Some artifacts could plausibly belong to two types. The dominant register decides. Magic internet money is a Phrase even though it traveled as iconography; the Bitcoin Symbol is Iconography even though it has a name.

Eras

Each entry is placed in one of ten cultural eras. Eras are not strict date ranges — they are registers. Two entries from the same year can sit in different eras if they belong to different cultural moments. The eras are defined as follows:

Pre-Genesis

The cypherpunk decades that prefigured bitcoin — the writings, protocols, and ideologies it descended from.

Genesis

The whitepaper, the genesis block, the first months. The system existed; almost no one knew.

First Bull

Bitcoin acquires a price, a community, and its first mythology. The pizza, the Silk Road, the Cyprus moment.

Dark Forest

The reckoning years. Mt. Gox, exit scams, hostile regulators. Bitcoin reveals it has predators, and the survivors learn to verify.

2017 Run

The first cycle that escaped containment. Mainstream attention, the block size wars, the symbol settles.

The Long Wait

The patient years between the cycles. Quiet building, slow accumulation, philosophy maturing.

Pandemic Era

Bitcoin meets unprecedented monetary expansion. Stack sats, have fun staying poor, memes harden into thesis.

Frauds

The year the centralized intermediaries collapsed. Terra/Luna, Celsius, FTX. A reckoning not unlike Mt. Gox eight years earlier.

Institutional Takeover

Wall Street, sovereign treasuries, and the ETFs arrive. Bitcoin acquires institutional credibility on its own terms.

Now

The present cycle. What we are watching unfold.

Some eras overlap in calendar time. Dark Forest and The Long Wait both run through the mid-2010s — the first captures the era's threats, the second its patience. Where an artifact could plausibly belong to either, the dominant register decides.

Foundational entries

A small subset of entries are flagged foundational — the cornerstones the rest of the catalog descends from. The whitepaper, the genesis block, the Bitcoin Symbol, the cypherpunk manifesto, hashcash. Foundational is a high bar; absence is the default. Most entries are not foundational. A handful are.

The flag is editorial, not navigational. It marks entries that other entries reference, build on, or reply to — the load-bearing artifacts the catalog assumes you already know.

Sourcing

Every entry carries at least one verifiable receipt — a primary source where possible, a credible secondary source where not. Where an origin is genuinely unsettled, the entry says so. Earliest known appearance, exact origin unsettled beats a confident wrong claim.

Quotes are kept short and used sparingly. The catalog's job is to attribute, not to reproduce.

Revisions

Errors and omissions will happen. Where they do, we revise. Each entry carries an edition number and a publication date, both visible at the foot of the entry page — the edition increments when a substantive change is made, the date records the original publication. Corrections from readers are welcomed.

What this catalog is not

Not a news site. Not a price tracker. Not a personality showcase. Not a survey of cryptocurrency — the catalog covers bitcoin and the cultural artifacts bitcoin produced, and that scope is editorial, not gatekeeping.

The catalog is finite. It will not grow forever. The aim is the canon, not the corpus.