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Many websites say Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin on 09 Jan 2009 (Source 1) (Source 2) (Source 3).

After looking through the Satoshi Archive, it seems to have been released on 08 Jan 2009 (Source).

Just wondering, when was Bitcoin released to the public? Which of these is correct?

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  • Note: the genesis block includes and encoding of a headline from the 3 Jan 2009 print of The Times newspaper. So the genesis block was mined on or after that date.
    – chytrik
    Apr 17, 2020 at 21:42

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It depends on how you define release.

Satoshi sent the email to the Cryptography mailing list on Jan 8 2009 UTC. However because the Cryptography mailing list is moderated, that email did not reach email subscribers until Jan 9 or 10 2009 (it's actually Jan 10 2009 at 1 AM UTC).

The discrepancy you see is that many people refer to The Mail Archive source. The Mail Archive is a subscriber to mailing lists and publishes the emails it receives. So it received the email on Jan 9 in its local time. The metzdowd.com source is "more accurate" because that's where the list is actually hosted, so it shows the time that the mailing list server received the email.

Presumably the link the Satoshi provides was reachable at or before he sent the email, so you could say that Bitcoin was actually released on Jan 8.

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  • Thank you so much for this. Very helpful. Can I cite your reply in my paper?
    – Aman Saggu
    Apr 17, 2020 at 3:51

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