Bitcoin Mailing List Now Inactive After 10 Years

Key Points:

• The Linux Foundation has closed the historic Bitcoin Mailing List, prompting Bitcoin Core developers to move it to Google Groups for continued support.
• Developer Bryan Bishop has transferred archived records from the Linux Foundation and other platforms to the new Google Group to preserve Bitcoin’s historical communications.

According to Protos, the Linux Foundation officially closed a nearly nine-year “Bitcoin Mailing List” that was considered a central hub for Bitcoin developers.

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Bitcoin Mailing List Moves from Linux Foundation to Google Groups

Late last year, the foundation stopped maintaining the mailing list, and now the Bitcoin Core development team has moved it to Google Groups, where it will be hosted on Google infrastructure.

Most of the important discussions, debates, and decisions made by developers on technical issues in more than ten consecutive years were hosted by the Bitcoin Mailing List. Conceived back in the year 2008, it played a very important role in coordinating the updates of Bitcoin Core, which underpins all the Bitcoin transactions around the world.

Yet anyone visiting the original mailing list archive hosted on the Linux Foundation’s site will be greeted by an error message declaring “No such list bitcoin-dev,” suggesting the historic home of the forum is no longer operational and that it is closed for good.

Shift in Bitcoin Developer Communications as Historic Forum Closes

In response to this change, Bitcoin developer Bryan Bishop has uploaded the Bitcoin Mailing List’s historical records, including communications from earlier record-keeping platforms like SourceForge.net and OSUOSL, to the new Google Group.

The migration has preserved a great chunk of Bitcoin’s history, but some archived pages remain inaccessible. For users looking to access particular historical records, there is a potential workaround in the Wayback Machine on Archive.org, which has captured snapshots of the old archive.

The move marks the end of an era as communications around Bitcoin turn to a wider variety of platforms. Modern communications tools have, over the past few years, given developers a range of ways to collaborate-secure channels that allow interactions to be pseudonymous or anonymous.