The mission of .BITCOIN is to provide a namespace associated with the concept of bitcoin as a decentralized digital asset. The .BITCOIN gTLD is intended to serve a broad range of registrants and users, including individuals, businesses, organizations, communities, projects, and other entities that identify with, relate to, or wish to be associated with the concept represented by the applied-for string.
The purpose of .BITCOIN is to enable registrants to establish online identities using domain names that correspond to this concept. To achieve this purpose, Bird Pepper, LLC will make .BITCOIN available for registration through registrars and other appropriate distribution channels; maintain a secure, stable, and reliable registry infrastructure; implement registration and operational policies that support the availability, security, and integrity of the namespace; and provide ongoing administration of the gTLD to enable registrants to register and use domain names within the namespace.
The purpose of .BITCOIN is sustainable over time because decentralized digital assets will continue to play a fundamental and enduring role in the digital economy. As society and technology evolve, organizations and individuals will continue to establish online identities associated with the applied-for string.
Mission. To operate .bitcoin as a restricted namespace serving the Bitcoin operational and contributor community, in which a domain name is evidence that its holder performs a verifiable function in the operation, development or provision of the Bitcoin network.
Purpose. The Bitcoin ecosystem is a persistent target of impersonation and fraud, and the general public has no reliable signal by which to distinguish a genuine operator, wallet or exchange from an imitation of one. Because eligibility for a .bitcoin registration is conditioned on a verifiable functional qualification, the namespace supplies that signal: registration is itself a statement, enforceable through the registry’s own policy, that the registrant is a participant in the network’s operation and not a party appropriating its name. Restriction is therefore the purpose, not an incident of it.
Intended registrants and users. Registrants are the members of the identified community: node and DNS seed operators; contributors to the reference implementation and the standards process; operators of explorers, wallets, exchanges, custody, payments and mining services; publishers and educators documenting the protocol; and organizers of the community’s conferences, meetups and working groups. Users are those registrants together with the wider public who rely on the namespace as an indication that a service is a bona fide participant.
Activities undertaken and to be undertaken. The registry will operate .bitcoin under a Community Registration Policy proposed for inclusion in Specification 12 of the Registry Agreement; verify eligibility against the published functional qualifications before registration and on renewal; maintain a published abuse point of contact that receives and acts on reports of non-qualifying or abusive registrations; and operate under TLD-scoped governance in which the community’s relevant bodies determine policy and the applicant, as the contracting party, executes it.
Sustainability over time. The purpose sustains itself by the same mechanism that defines it. Verification is funded from registration fees, so the cost of policing eligibility scales with the namespace it polices; the registry has no auction program and no premium-name program, so its revenue does not depend on selling names outside the community it serves. The applicant has operated the network’s most widely integrated public block explorer and one of its DNS seeds for over seven years without charging the community for either, and the registry commits 21% of gross revenue to funding Bitcoin development and infrastructure, returning the namespace’s proceeds to the community whose participation gives it meaning. These commitments stand as fixed obligations in the registry’s financial planning, and the 21% pledge is already a matter of public record in the applicant’s published notice to the community.