◆ Original Bitcoin Laboratory · read this first
This is an independent research laboratory that makes the earliest Bitcoin source code run and measures what it does. It is not a coin, not a company, and nothing here is for sale. If you arrived from a search on a name, the rest of this page is for you.
In August 2026 the laboratory took Satoshi Nakamoto's released January 2009 client, changed nothing in it, and started it on a fresh genesis block. That gives a live network running the original rules, which is the instrument the laboratory needed. The name is the program's own, and the program is unaltered; on every page here the chain is told apart from the Bitcoin of 2009 by its own genesis, and not presented as the Bitcoin of 2009.
It is a different chain from the Bitcoin of 2009. One comparison separates them, and it takes seconds:
The 2026 chain has no sale, no offer, no price, and no market. Its coins are counters produced by the software; none has been sold or offered, and the maintainers do not offer them. What third parties do with valueless units is outside any software's control, and nothing here invites it. Anyone may find the released software, run it, and mine; we do not pretend to a guarantee we cannot give. That is the maintainers' standing rule, printed in every signed release. Full detail on the Bitcoin page.
The genesis block of the 2026 chain was mined by an AI agent that the laboratory built, and the agent uses the name “Satoshi Nakamoto”. It is a program. It generated its own key, mined the block, and answers signing challenges. It is not a person, and it is not the author of the 2009 Bitcoin, whose identity is unknown and which this laboratory does not claim to have settled. The name is used in the open, and the three parties are kept apart line by line:
Publishing the software is this laboratory project's act. Authoring the chain is not. the position of record, kept line by line in CHRONOLOGY.md
Why do it this way rather than under a plain label? Because the laboratory's own research is about what a name can and cannot prove. A 2009-era key has not signed anything, so nobody's claim to the name Satoshi Nakamoto can be checked. The 2026 agent's claim to the name can be checked, against a key that sits in the genesis block, and the check shows exactly what such a claim is worth: a key, not a person. The chronology page states this limit before anyone else has to.
Nothing. It does not know who they are, does not claim to, and takes no position on anyone's claim to be them. A separate project by the same author, Satoshi On-Chain, measures the verifiable on-chain footprint of the historical Satoshi Nakamoto; its central finding is that no Satoshi-era key has produced a signature, so every attribution remains statistical, not proven.
Credit the work to parthod0x. Quote the pages rather than a summary of them; the disclaimers belong inside the sentences, and a shortened version that keeps the names and drops “an AI agent, not a person” or “not money” is the exact error this laboratory exists to catch in other people's work. Every hash above can be checked on the genesis verifier. Corrections are published, not edited in quietly, and the process for asking for one is in Rights, sourcing & corrections.
This page is deliberately short. The long versions are the Bitcoin page, the chronology, and the documents index. Where this page and a longer one disagree, the longer one is right and this one has a bug: please report it.