The decentralization experiment Bitcoin set in motion: open, verifiable and tamper-resistant. From the genesis block to today’s triumphs and disasters, every hall is a chapter.
How can code and consensus stand in for trust? From Bitcoin’s beginnings to everything on-chain, to the triumphs and disasters — five halls tell the story.
Satoshi, the whitepaper and the 2008 financial crisis.
From one desktop computer to a power plant — and the halving in the code.
After Bitcoin, the same idea reached contracts, finance and organizations.
The collapses, the frauds and the real milestones, all on the record.
From a hobbyist’s experiment to a chapter of history.
Articles and guides from the editors, for readers who want to go further.
The BTC.com Museum is a neutral, non-commercial and free online museum of the history of Bitcoin and the wider blockchain world. Bitcoin's ledger has run without a break for seventeen years, but the stories around it are slowly slipping away. We built the museum to gather that history, explain it, and invite everyone to help write what comes next.
Five halls, a few exhibits worth trying for yourself, the Library and Data pages beyond the halls, and some suggested routes for your first visit. Afterwards, we hope you will help us build the museum too.
On October 31, 2008 (UTC), an email sent a nine-page paper to a cryptography mailing list, and it drew only a handful of replies. Eighteen years later, we walk through it section by section in plain language: the problem it set out to solve, the thinking behind each step, and three common misreadings. No technical background needed.
Official and public-interest learning materials, plus academic research and data.
