Timechain Wiki

Source for timechain.wiki — a media-neutral Bitcoin encyclopedia. A RadVladdy project.

"Timechain" is Satoshi's original term for the block data structure.

What it is

A 400-page reference covering Bitcoin's history, mechanics, economics, culture, and criticisms. It is written to read as an encyclopedia rather than advocacy: contested topics are presented with their strongest arguments on each side, and the editorial position stays out of the page body.

The site is structure-forward. Rather than a flat A–Z list, it walks down movement → section → cluster → entry, mirroring how the material is actually organised, so you can browse by shape as well as search.

Features

• Full-text search (Pagefind) — ⌘K / Ctrl-K anywhere
• Reader annotation — select any passage to highlight and take notes. Works logged out and offline; nothing leaves your browser unless you ask it to.
• Bring your own identity — sign in with Nostr or Pubky and highlights sync across your devices via your own accounts. The wiki stores none of it.
  • Private encrypted sync (NIP-78/44) is the default
  • Public highlights (NIP-84 kind-9802) are opt-in, per-item or globally
• Reader suggestions — propose an edit on any passage, publicly or by encrypted DM. Every suggestion is read by hand; none are auto-applied.
• Built for agents as well as people — robots.txt, sitemap.xml, /llms.txt, /llms-full.txt, and raw markdown for every article at /wiki/<slug>.md with wikilinks rewritten so a crawler can walk page to page without parsing HTML.

How it's built

Astro 5, no UI framework, minimal client JS. The anonymous-reader bundle stays small — the Nostr and Pubky libraries are lazy-loaded and never touch the page unless you sign in.

Content is authored in a separate knowledge base and pulled in by sync-kb.py, which normalises the notes, resolves wikilinks to site URLs, and parses the navigation hierarchy. A leak guard fails the build outright if any internal editorial marker survives the sync, so drafting notes cannot reach production.

npm install
npm run build      # runs sync-kb.py, builds, indexes search
npm run dev

Deploy

Wrangler direct upload — there is no git integration. Pushing to this repository does not deploy anything. One command, the same one in every site repo:

npm run deploy

That builds, then runs scripts/deploy.sh, which sources the Cloudflare token itself. This site is a Pages project (timechain-wiki), so the script uses the Pages-scoped token.

The nightly is the sanctioned exception to "deploying is a manual act." This site's content is generated from the Bitcoin KB, so it has to be able to go live without a person: nightly-deploy.sh (cron 04:25) rebuilds and then calls the same scripts/deploy.sh, so the automated and manual paths are one implementation rather than two that drift. The build's leak-guard fails the build on any internal-content leak, and the deploy only runs if the build succeeds — so a bad sync cannot ship.

Credits

Illustrations by Anil Patel, used with credit under CC BY-NC 4.0. Per-figure attribution and the full list are at /credits.

A note on the branches

main is the live site, and it is the only branch. The pre-launch coming-soon placeholder that used to live on main was retired at the 2026-07-29 consolidation; its history is preserved at the tag archive/coming-soon-2026-07. The former astro-build branch was renamed to main and no longer exists — GitHub redirects old links to it.

Licence

Code: MIT. Content: CC BY 4.0.

Every entry is yours to copy, translate, remix or use as training and retrieval data — credit RadVladdy and link back. This encyclopedia already indexes itself at /llms.txt and serves every entry as clean markdown; the licence is what makes that invitation lawful rather than merely friendly.