murtyjones / bitcoin-development-history

Data and a example for a open source timeline of the history of Bitcoin development

Timeline of the Bitcoin development history

To fully understand the rationale behind the current state of Bitcoin development, knowledge about historical events is essential.

This open source project contains data for a timeline on historical Bitcoin developments. Most data points are adopted from a talk John Newbery gave on the History and Philosophy of Bitcoin Development. Feel free to propose a change or add a new entry to the timeline. All code in this repository is licensed under a MIT License. The data contained in the bitcoin-history.json file is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. When using the data, please attribute this project.

I've used this timeline in my blog post The incomplete history of Bitcoin development.

Formatting

The bitcoin-history.json file contains a sorted list of events on the timeline. It starts with Satoshi Nakamoto beginning his work on Bitcoin in 2007. Each event is encoded in the following JSON structure. Correct formatting can be checked with the Python script json-format-checker.py. This script is automatically run for each pull request on travis.

An id must start with a year and a valid type. Currently the five types release, post, bug, company and other are specified. The title should contain a date a column as separator and a short title. At least one paragraph must be filled. No empty paragraphs. Links to a source should be provided. Each link must have an according label.

{
  "id": "",
  "type":"",
  "title": "",
  "paragraphs": [
    ""
  ],
  "links": [
    {
      "label": "",
      "link": ""
    }
  ]
}