The Bitcoin Mailing List and its history is erased from Linux

Swathes of Bitcoin’s history have been erased from the internet forum that hosted communications between developers for nearly a decade.

Today, the migration of the group email list commonly known as the ‘Bitcoin Mailing List‘ is complete and Bitcoin Core developers have purged its archives from their open-source home on the Linux Foundation forever.

Visitors to the former homepage of the archive are now simply greeted with an error message: “No such list bitcoin-dev.”

It is the end of an era of sorts for communicating about Bitcoin development.

From now on, the list will live on via a Google Group, supported by the $2 trillion tech giant’s infrastructure. The move was prompted, in part, by the Linux Foundation’s decision to stop hosting email lists as of year-end 2023.

Bitcoin developer Bryan Bishop has now uploaded historical records from Linux and all of the other record-keeping systems of bitcoin-dev, including SourceForge.net and OSUOSL, to the Google Group.

For visitors who encounter an error when trying to retrieve historical messages from Linux, it’s suggested they input the URL into Archive.org’s WayBack Machine which has logged many of its formerly hosted webpages that tracked emails between Bitcoin developers.

Read more: The main Bitcoin-dev mailing list might cease operating next month

Reflecting on 15 years of Bitcoin developer emails

With the transition to Google Groups underway, some people took the opportunity to reflect on the evolution of technical Bitcoin development. In the lead-up to the switch from Linux to Google, many developers admitted that their communication style had drifted over the years from email to a multi-channel approach.

For the first decade of Bitcoin communications starting in 2008, email was the near-exclusive venue for communicating about technical changes. For years, email remained the forum to discuss changes to Bitcoin Core, the world’s dominant software for nodes validating BTC transactions.

Nowadays, several developers say they prefer to speak via messengers, social media, private servers, or an assortment of other channels.

In short, bitcoin-dev is no longer the exclusive gathering place for Bitcoin devs. As technology has advanced, communication channels have proliferated that allow doxxed, pseudonymous, and truly anonymous communication among the most senior contributors to Bitcoin’s protocol.

With the Linux listserv sunsetted and Google Groups operational, developers will continue to write code and debate others’ code contributions for years to come.

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