An encyclopedia you can mark up with your own keys
Before “blockchain” settled into the language, Satoshi’s own code called the data structure a timechain — a chain of cryptographic timestamps. The older word names the deeper idea: an unforgeable record of when, secured by work.
It seemed like the right name for a reference work about all of it.
TimechainWiki is live at timechain.wiki — 394 entries covering Bitcoin’s economics, history, technology, culture, practice and criticisms. Free, no ads, no paywall, nothing for sale.
It is built as a structure rather than a search box. Seven movements — from the monetary foundations, through the case for Bitcoin and the machine itself, to the analytical frameworks, the practice, and the discourse around it — each opening onto sections, clusters, and entries. You can walk the whole argument end to end, or drop in anywhere with ⌘K. Entries carry learning levels, cite their sources, and cross-link like a proper encyclopedia.
That is the ordinary half. Here is the half that only works because Nostr exists.
Your highlights, your keys
Select any passage on any entry and it highlights. Add a note to it. No account, no extension, no sign-up — logged out, everything saves in your browser and stays there.
Sign in with Nostr and you choose what happens to each one. Private is the default, and the three settings mean exactly what they say:
- Private — your highlights and notes sync as NIP-78 app data (kind 30078), NIP-44-encrypted to yourself. Relays carry ciphertext and nothing else. They follow you to your other devices; they appear in nobody’s feed, including your own.
- Public — NIP-84 highlights (kind 9802), your note travelling inside the event. That is the format highlight-aware clients already speak, so a passage you mark here shows up in Amethyst or Highlighter alongside everything else you have ever highlighted.
- Off — this device only, nothing leaves the browser.
Any single highlight can override the default, and /highlights collects everything you have marked across the whole encyclopedia, each one deep-linked back to the sentence it came from.
Pubky works as a sign-in too: approve in Pubky Ring and your highlights write to your own homeserver. Those are public today — private storage is on Pubky’s roadmap, and the moment it ships, this moves behind it.
The through-line is that the wiki never holds your reading. There is no account here to keep, nothing to export later, nothing of yours to lose if the site goes away.
The door goes both ways
Every highlight also carries suggest an edit.
An encyclopedia is only as good as its corrections. This one is rendered from a hand-curated knowledge base — every entry hand-written, every source read — which means the gaps in it are real, and the people most likely to find them are the ones reading closely enough to highlight a sentence.
So that door is open, and it runs on Nostr as well. Mark the passage, say what is wrong or missing, and pick how it travels: a public note (kind 1) signed as you, or an encrypted direct message to the editors (NIP-17 gift wrap — nothing on your feed, your identity hidden from the relays). Private is the default here too.
Either way, a person reads it. Nothing is ever applied to an entry automatically. What holds up gets worked into the entry, and the site rebuilds from the knowledge base that night.
Corrections are welcome. So are missing arguments, a source used unfairly, and — most of all — a critic whose strongest version is not the one on the page.
Machines read here too
Every entry is also served as clean markdown: add .md to any entry’s address. The whole encyclopedia is indexed at /llms.txt and concatenated at /llms-full.txt. Hand either one to whatever model you like and ask it to explain something to a friend who has never heard of any of this.
Where to start
At the end, in the discourse movement, where the criticisms live — wealth concentration and the Patoshi pattern, the Ponzi and no-intrinsic-value arguments, the fixed-supply deflation critique, volatility as a unit-of-account failure. Each one stated the way the people making it state it, with the responses that exist and the places where the disagreement is still live.
https://timechain.wiki/wiki/criticisms-of-bitcoin/
You can reach the wiki on Nostr at hello@timechain.wiki.
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