by Saïvann Carignan (@saivann), David Harding (@harding), and Balaji S. Srinivasan (@balajis)

Before we can get billions of Bitcoin users, we are going to need millions of Bitcoin developers. Ultimately that means native software and hardware support for the Bitcoin protocol on every machine, which is why we built the 21 Bitcoin Computer. But we are also going to need free, high quality documentation of the core Bitcoin protocol, accessible on any device and available in many languages.

Towards that end, as the two main contributors to Bitcoin.org (@saivann and @harding) we are now joining 21 to help bring quality Bitcoin Developer Documentation to everyone. We’ve begun by creating several new tutorials that should take any developer who knows how to use Github from zero knowledge of Bitcoin to a reasonable facility with protocol basics and the Blockchain. By going through them you will learn things like:

But this is just the start. We are committed to ensuring that new and existing documentation generated both at 21.co and on bitcoin.org will remain freely accessible and open source under an attribution-required Creative Commons License. What that means in practice is that any website or app will be free in perpetuity to use and embed the documentation as long as attribution is included. Examples include Bitcoin.org itself and our new 21.co/learn website.

In addition to the core Bitcoin.org contributors, we also know that there’s a world of as-yet-undiscovered talent out there, especially outside the United States. So if you want to help others learn Bitcoin, please submit a tutorial or translation here and we will pay you up to $200 in bitcoin per article upon acceptance.

Going forward, in addition to adding new content from an army of contributors, we will be working on improving mobile and embedded support and translating the documentation into many more languages. But there’s more than enough to get started today! So if you’re a developer, go here to start learning Bitcoin.