The Satoshi Nakamoto Institute: The Canon Was Written in Austin

What is the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, and why is it in Austin?

Because it began as a University of Texas reading group. Michael Goldstein ran the Mises Circle, an Austrian-economics study group on the Austin campus, and when Bitcoin reached it the group started writing – Pierre Rochard, a UT accounting student, from December 2012; Daniel Krawisz with a four-part series on crypto-anarchy in the spring of 2013.^{[5][6][19][3]} In November 2013 the three launched the Institute under a name Goldstein says began as a joke in conversation – “a Nakamoto Institute for Bitcoin” – with a mission that has not changed since: “to advance and preserve knowledge of Bitcoin's history, economics, and technology.”^[1][2][3] The reading group posted the invitation to its successor in May 2014.^[4] Austin at the time had a Bitcoin meetup that drew a few dozen people on a good month; the Institute was the part of that room that wrote things down.^[3] The wider city story is in the Texas crypto archive.

What did the Institute write that the network still quotes?

Three essays in six months of 2014, and a vocabulary. On March 29, Krawisz published “Hyperbitcoinization” – a voluntary transition from an inferior currency to a superior one, made of “a series of individual acts of entrepreneurship rather than a single monopolist that games the system.”^[6] On July 4, Rochard published “Speculative Attack”: Bitcoin overtakes weak currencies “through speculative attacks and currency crises, not through the careful evaluation of tech journalists” – borrow the weak money, buy the hard one.^[5] On September 11, Goldstein published “Everyone's a Scammer”: “There is a war going on for your bitcoins, and willpower is your only defense.”^[7] Around them sat the anti-altcoin line – “The Problem with Altcoins,” “Appcoins Are Snake Oil,” “The Coming Demise of the Altcoins” – years before the position had a slur to go with it, and Krawisz's “The Legacy of the Dread Pirate Roberts,” the Institute's reading of the case told on the Ross Ulbricht page.^[6] The Mempool then became the shelf the next generation published on: all sixteen parts of Parker Lewis's “Gradually, Then Suddenly” in 2019 and 2020, Ross Ulbricht's “Bitcoin Equals Freedom” in 2019, Gigi's “Bitcoin is Time” in 2021, and Goldstein's own return in 2022 and 2023 – seventy-six essays in all, counted in September 2026.^[8]

What does the archive actually hold?

Two reference works. The Complete Satoshi is the whitepaper, every known email and forum post, the original code, the curated quotes, and the PGP key of the pseudonymous author, spanning 2008 to 2012, published under a Creative Commons license – the copy of record that other archives cite.^[9] The Library is the argument that Bitcoin has a lineage: David Chaum's blind signatures (1982), Tim May's crypto-anarchist manifesto (1988), Eric Hughes's cypherpunk manifesto (1993), Nick Szabo's smart contracts, “Shelling Out,” and Bit Gold, Wei Dai's b-money, Adam Back's hashcash, Hal Finney's reusable proofs of work – shelved beside Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard.^[10] Its first sentence is the Institute's thesis: “Bitcoin was not forged in a vacuum.”^[10] The site's own telling of that lineage, and of Texas's place in it, is the history of Bitcoin in Texas.

The honest counterweight: the co-founder who left, and the years nobody was home

The Institute's most prolific author ended up on the other side of its central argument. Krawisz wrote thirty-four of the Mempool's seventy-six essays; the last ran on January 8, 2017.^[6][8] Seven months later, with Bitcoin Cash forking off, he told Bitcoin.com “I don't like altcoins, but I like forks” – forks put investors, not developers, in control.^[12] By 2020 he was a Bitcoin SV advocate: “BTC betrayed me,” and “I lost the allies with whom I started the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute because they bought into ‘core’ ideas” – a think tank, he said, that should also have been a mining pool.^[13] The second criticism is quieter: between roughly 2017 and 2023 the Institute was a website, not an organization – new essays arrived, but the founders were elsewhere, Goldstein consulting and podcasting, Rochard at Kraken and then Riot.^[7][18] And a third, which this site is in a position to notice: the canon described hyperbitcoinization as individual acts, not state policy – and the state that got there first was Texas, by statute, with a $10 million reserve the essays never imagined.

The fair reading is that all three are the record working as designed. The Institute did not delete Krawisz when he left; his thirty-four essays are online with the rest, which is what an archive is for.^[6] The dormant years still produced the shelf Parker Lewis and Gigi published on.^[8] And a state reserve is a speculative attack by another name – a treasury borrowing against the dollar to hold the harder asset – which is closer to Rochard's 2014 essay than to anything its critics predicted. The Institute's own podcast now grades these arguments against a decade of hindsight, episode by episode.^[15]

What changed in 2024?

It became an institution in fact as well as name. On March 4, 2024 the newsletter announced “Going Institutional”: a Texas 501(c)(3) public charity, with an IRS ruling that year.^[14][17] A redesign fundraiser opened in April and closed on May 27 at 21 million sats; a translation community launched April 30 in more than fifteen languages.^[14][3] On July 5, OpenSats funded the Institute under its Education Initiative – 213 million sats in total support – to rebuild the archive “using the same preservation standards that govern the Library of Congress.”^[16] On July 26 the new site shipped under a title borrowed from an Austin neighbor's essay series: “The New SNI: Gradually, Then Suddenly.”^[14] In February 2025 came The Reorg, Goldstein's re-reading of the archive, opening with Rochard on his 2013 argument that Bitcoin competes with fiat.^[15] Fiscal 2024 revenue was about $138,000; the first annual dinner was announced for early 2026.^[17][14]

Where does the Institute stand in the Texas story?

As the intellectual origin of the builder scene the rest of this site covers. Rochard, the speculative-attack theorist, became Vice President of Research at Riot Platforms – the company that owns the Rockdale mine – and then founded The Bitcoin Bond Company.^[18] Parker Lewis wrote his series on the Institute's shelf while building Unchained in Austin.^[8] A few miles away, Jimmy Song was teaching the protocol at the same university the reading group came from. The officeholders who wrote Texas's Bitcoin law are on their own pages; this one is the room where the reasons were written first.