The βook
of βitcoin

No rights reserved over the text of this book. What follows is where a copyright page would sit, and it is here to say the reverse of what one usually says.

The record is not mine to hold. The readings of it are mine only in the sense that my name belongs on them, so that you can weigh them and disagree.

• The prose — the chain's own speech, in every languagePublic domain
• The sigla — the alphabet that prose is written inPublic domain
• Annotations, names, curation, this prefaceCC BY 4.0
• Commentary by othersTheirs
• The software that renders itMIT / Apache-2.0

Quote any passage freely, at any length, in any medium, with or without credit. Full terms, and the reasoning behind each of them, are in the repository's README.

…

Every passage in this book cites itself, and every script in it is set in marks. Both are read here.

The reference

A citation names a place in the chain, one level at a time. Each level carries the sign of what it is:

Read aloud: the fifth block of the second difficulty window of the third halving era, first transaction. The volume is set in Roman numerals, as a book's volumes are. A citation may stop early — III β2 names the whole book, and III β2 ■5 the whole chapter.

The marks

What the marks mean, group by group — the same key the book opens over a chapter, here at rest and whole.

Every opcode

The key above glosses the marks worth explaining; this is the index behind it — one line per opcode, families sharing a base glyph and separating by subscript.