The Community Effort That Gives a Voice to the Bitcoin White Paper
Since its publication in 2008, the Bitcoin white paper has been hosted across multiple platforms. Anyone who wants to read the nine pages that made monetary history can easily find them in various corners of the internet.
But one initiative went a step further: in a 25-minute video published on Monday, the "Voicepaper" brings together bitcoiners from around the world to recite the Bitcoin white paper line by line and immortalize it in video and audio.
The video was brought to life by multidisciplinary artist Dim Zayan, author of Bitcoin fable Bulltardia, as part of a two-part project dubbed "House of WaaS." Both parts come in video form; the first video shows Zayan shouting the content of the white paper into the wilderness, while the second presents a collage of sentences recited by individual bitcoiners, industry representatives, and anonymous community members.
"While the first video looks at the symbiotic relationship at the individual level, I wanted Part II—the Voicepaper—to focus on the community, celebrating its strong unity and amazing diversity," Zayan told the BTC Times. "That fervent, almost religious belief in Bitcoin is being shared across the board and regardless of aspirations, industries, age, or backgrounds. A diverse and powerful community is the seed needed for hyperbitcoinization to flourish."
The timing of Zayan's performance project could hardly be better, as the Bitcoin white paper was recently uploaded to dozens of new destinations in an act of defiance: the move followed news that a number of websites, including BitcoinCore.org and Bitcoin.org, had received letters from Craig Wright's lawyers accusing the hosts of copyright infringement along with threats of litigation.
Wright has initiated multiple lawsuits over the years to 'prove' he is the pseudonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. As part of his pursuit, Wright has made numerous claims, such as statements that he owned—but couldn't access—the private keys to Bitcoin addresses associated with Satoshi Nakamoto, and that he wrote the Bitcoin white paper—but also that Satoshi plagiarized him when writing the white paper.
If anything, Wright's latest antics achieved the exact opposite of what he intended from participants in the Bitcoin space. Although Zayan says he had planned the project prior to these events, they did lead to expedited execution, as they "created an opportunity for the community to voice its strength."
And indeed, the Voicepaper initiative was met with a lot more interest than Zayan had expected:
The thing grew completely organically, and in just a few days, 160 bitcoiners had offered to contribute. It even got to a point where we had to have a waitlist.
While the video stars high-profile bitcoiners like Michael Saylor and Adam Back, Zayan deliberately made sure to include community members of all background, or, as he called them, "bitcoiners with no clout or fame."
The support for the Voicepaper project extended beyond the recital of a sentence in the white paper though, as Zayan received editing help from Richard James, creator of the documentary Hard Money, while sound mastering support came from art collective 21ism's Sir Badders.
"In the end, we managed to produce this video with zero budget, but with an incredible amount of good spirit," Zayan said. "In itself, it proves the point the video makes."