COPYING: Correct start date for “The Bitcoin Core developers” copyright line #34563

1. 
   melvincarvalho commented at 6:45 pm on February 11, 2026: none

   Summary

   The COPYING file dates “The Bitcoin Core developers” from 2009, but that project name didn’t exist until the v0.9.0 rebrand in March 2014.

   This change reflects historical naming, not contributor scope — early contributors’ work is fully covered under “Bitcoin Developers.”

   Evidence from git history

   Commit	Date	Author	Copyright Notice
   e071a3f6c06f	2009-08-30	sirius-m	Copyright (c) 2009 Satoshi Nakamoto
   98500d70a8cf	2010-02-12	s_nakamoto	Copyright (c) 2009-2010 Satoshi Nakamoto
   fc73ad644f0b	2010-12-13	s_nakamoto	Copyright (c) 2009-2010 Bitcoin Developers
   3b00e7c23164	2015-04-22	sandakersmann	Copyright (c) 2009-2015 The Bitcoin Core developers
   d552ed678c26	2017-09-13	Paul Berg (committed by gmaxwell)	Restored Bitcoin Developers as 2nd line

   Key points:

   • Satoshi replaced his own name with “Bitcoin Developers” in his final v0.3.19 release (Dec 2010, fc73ad644f0b)
   • The project was known as “Bitcoin” with “Bitcoin Developers” until the v0.9.0 rebrand to “Bitcoin Core” (March 2014; see #3203, #3408)
   • In 2015, 3b00e7c23164 replaced “Bitcoin Developers” with “The Bitcoin Core developers” and backdated it to 2009
   • #11318 (gmaxwell, 2017) partially addressed this by restoring “Bitcoin Developers” as a second line — sipa identified 3b00e7c as having introduced the naming error. However, the start date was not corrected

   Current state

   0Copyright (c) 2009-2026 The Bitcoin Core developers
   1Copyright (c) 2009-2026 Bitcoin Developers
   

   Proposed fix

   0Copyright (c) 2014-2026 The Bitcoin Core developers
   1Copyright (c) 2009-2026 Bitcoin Developers
   

   The only change is 2009 → 2014 on the first line, correcting it to reflect when the “Bitcoin Core” name came into use. Line order is unchanged.

   This is a single-number fix consistent with the project’s preference for accurate copyright notices, as demonstrated by #11318. No change to the license text itself.

2. 
   maflcko commented at 9:37 am on February 13, 2026: member

   I don’t understand the issue here. What is the downside or harm this is fixing? I wasn’t around at that time, but there are certainly developers that contributed to this git repo after 2015, who have also contributed to it before. So if this is changed now, in 5 years someone else is going to change it back again. I just don’t see the point here.

   In any case, I’ll go ahead and close this for now. The discussion can continue in the pull request. There is no need to have two threads.

3. maflcko closed this on Feb 13, 2026

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