Recently the team at LocalCoinSwap became aware of an issue involving the "alleged" ownership of the Bitcoin whitepaper. This resulted in pressure on the developers and maintainers of bitcoin.org, bitcoincore.org, and bitcoin.com to remove the document from the sites mentioned above. This move is something that the team at LocalCoinSwap disagrees with this move, and we feel incredibly strongly about, so we wanted to clarify our position.
Bitcoin is at the heart of P2P trading and still, in 2021, the most popular digital asset to exchange by P2P traders. At LocalCoinSwap, we think it's essential to empower people with all that bitcoin has to offer, and that's why we are so passionate about what we do. Bitcoin doesn't just open doors; it makes them freeing people from a forced dependency on the archaic financial systems that focus more on exclusion and control than public service.
Every day we see people using the tools that Bitcoin offers to create opportunities for themselves and those in their community. Many of us take the ability to be paid for our work, share resources with our family, or just participate in the world economy for granted, but these tools can be life-changing for many others. Expecting the legacy financial system to shelter and provide for all of us just isn't coherent with the reality of the modern world, and ignoring this is blindness to the effects on the lives of people that are excluded from the ability to transact and exchange value with one another.
Bitcoin is powerful, and, likely, it will only continue to become more so with time, as the past has shown. This significance makes Bitcoin important for us to support and makes it vital for the rest of the community to stand for what is right amidst false claims and what is tantamount to extortionate behavior. Furthermore, putting pressure on the developers that help maintain the Bitcoin protocol and all associated software is shameful, and something that goes against everything Bitcoin stands for and the project's open-source nature.
Bitcoin was released under the MIT license, and this very permissive license has likely contributed to Bitcoin being as established as it is today. In addition, respecting the licenses of free and open-source software fosters development that has shaped our world in astonishing ways. Open-source software is used in everything from the phones we use to the websites we browse and even the appliances in our house.
Attacks on projects fueled by their communities aren’t just an attack on Bitcoin; it’s an attack on innovation and should not be tolerated without discourse and dispute. There are many great places to start learning more about free software. One excellent resource is the Free Software Foundation. At LocalCoinSwap, we support free and open-source software. We are continually working to provide more of our work to the community. Feel free to visit our GitHub to learn, fork, and build upon our repositories yourself.
Our response to this matter is quite simple. LocalCoinSwap is committed to supporting Bitcoin, not just on-chain but off-chain as well. For this reason, we have decided to host the Bitcoin whitepaper as a public statement against the recent actions of Craig Wright towards the bitcoin developers and broader community - who we firmly believe is not Satoshi and had no part whatsoever in the creation of Bitcoin. Therefore, we will continue to host the Bitcoin whitepaper in perpetuity, keeping the magic of Satoshi's original creation available and accessible for all to view.
In Satoshi's final verified email to Gavin Anderson, they made a point of how vital the dev contributors were to this open-source project, and that's just as important to think about today as it was in 2011. The achievements of the developers, users, node operators, miners, and even those that support Bitcoin have got the project to where it is today, and that's something worth defending in whatever way you can.
If you would like to contribute to Bitcoin Core, there’s a range of ways you can do so. Find out how to get involved over at bitcoin.org. There’s also a range of other fantastic Bitcoin projects you can support, like Electrum, which we highly suggest you explore.
If you haven't read the whitepaper yet, why not start right now? You can find it right here: https://localcoinswap.com/bitcoin.pdf