How Bitcoin was built, and why you never have to take it on trust
Thirty-four chapters. Five parts. Ninety-eight dated entries at the back, each with the block, the transaction, the docket or the filing that proves it. No price targets, no forecasts, no allocation — and a reader who can check every claim without asking anyone's permission.
Elapsed since 18:15:05 UTC, 3 January 2009, computed from your device's clock. The chain has produced a block roughly every ten minutes through all of it; the exact count is a chain reading your own node confirms.
The author's promiseYour copy. Your name.A personalised autograph.Trust us.Your funds are safe. Withdrawals will resume shortly.
The book is the beginning of the relationship, not the end of the transaction. Every path below stands on its own: buying does not require a masterclass, a review unlocks nothing, and the autograph promise does not depend on a rating.
Hardcover, paperback or Kindle, direct from Amazon. The product page is the single source for current format, price, delivery and availability.
Open the Amazon book page →Every dated entry carries the primitive record that proves it. The chain handles take about ninety seconds each from a laptop; Appendix B shows how, and the maintained Record on this site keeps them current.
Try three of them below →Join a masterclass taught by Dr. Chiang. At designated in-person sessions, bring your Amazon copy for a personalised autograph and a photograph together.
Read Dr. Chiang's promise →“If you bought Nine Pages on Amazon and bring your copy when we meet at a designated in-person masterclass or signing session, I will personally autograph it, personalise it to you, and take a photograph with you. That is my promise.”
Dr. Clemen Chiang
CEO, Aly Pte. Ltd. · Author of The Disclosed Record
There are no returns, no holdings and no screenshots in the book. Where the author says a thing happened, he names the record that proves it — a block height, a transaction, a court docket, a filing — of a kind the reader can pull without asking anyone's permission. Where the record is thin, the book says so in print.
From the thirty-first of October 2008 to the cut-off date of 27 September 2026, in a Record that closes at ninety-eight because padding to a round number is the failure the section exists to prevent.
Where a handle was opened and the record beneath it proved thinner than the entry needs, a line beneath the handle says what is missing. One of them says a figure cannot be closed by anyone, and why.
No exchange, custodian, broker, hardware maker, issuer or fund is named for the reader to use, paid for inclusion, or given approval over the text. Appendix D sets out a first purchase mechanically, naming nobody.
Five parts, in the manuscript's order. Part Two has no history, no personalities and no price; it is the part you will want to skip and the part that decides whether the rest is worth anything.
What money is, and the answer most of us were never taught: a record before an object. The people who spent a quarter of a century trying to build a record nobody keeps. Nine pages. A block. Two pizzas. The day the author stopped writing.
What a transaction is. How a block is made. Where the twenty-one million comes from and why it is smaller than it looks. What difficulty is, what hashrate is not, what a key actually is — then one chapter that asks you to stop reading and go and look.
An exchange in Tokyo. A two-year war over one number. A fork that proved what a fork proves. A marketplace, a Thursday in March, a government that could ban half the world's mining and did, and a year in which the middlemen failed one after another.
A listed company decides its cash is the risky asset. A small country makes the thing compulsory and then stops. A regulator refuses for a decade and a court tells it why it cannot. Eleven products in one morning, an accounting of the electricity, and what is settled and what is not at the cut-off date.
A jurisdiction that regulated the activity rather than the asset. Why C runs alongside the other three letters rather than after them. What a reader of the first two books already knows that is worth more here than they think — and what will hurt them. A site, a proposal, and a clock.
Each entry in the book has four parts: the date the thing happened, a title, two to four sentences, and the handle that proves it. These are three of the ninety-eight, printed as they appear. Copy the handle and open it in any public block explorer, court record system or filing index — or your own node.
The first block was mined with a coinbase carrying that morning's newspaper headline. The subsidy of fifty coins in it cannot be spent; the output was never added to the set of spendable coins.
At block 630,000 the subsidy fell from 12.5 to 6.25 coins, on schedule and without anyone's decision. The next day the author took his position, in public, after eleven years of saying no.
BitMEX, the venue that invented the perpetual, closed after eleven years in the same year the instrument was approved onshore. The Record was laid out for a hundred entries and closes at ninety-eight: that is where the events stopped.
The maintained Record — all ninety-eight entries, with corrections dated and errors preserved rather than deleted — is kept on this site, which carries no advertising and no product.
The sample is ungated, because a book that asks to be checked should let the reader inspect its argument before asking for trust. Forty pages: the front matter, complete Chapter 1, and complete Chapter 12 — the afternoon on a laptop that verifies the supply.
Dr. Clemen Chiang read civil and structural engineering at Nanyang Technological University, wrote to the Cboe Options Institute in his final year, and began teaching options in 2003 — among the first in Asia to do so. He has taught more than fifty thousand students, founded Spiking in 2016, and is a portfolio manager at Lucerne Asset Management.
He first wrote about this market in Spiking To The Moon, a beginner's guide to whales. Nine Pages supersedes it. On the twelfth of May 2020, the day after the third halving, he reversed eleven years of public scepticism about Bitcoin, live and timestamped, in front of several hundred of his own students; Chapter 20 is an account of what preceded that and what it cost.
Praise is somebody's word about a book. Read enough to form your own view, say what became clearer, what you disagreed with, and who would — or would not — find the book useful. No incentive, no request for a positive review. The autograph, photograph and masterclass paths do not depend on a review, a rating or what a review says.
These notes stay in your browser. Nothing is submitted to bitcoin.institute or to Amazon.
Money is a record of obligation before it is an object, and the object is a portable summary of the record.
The instrument was never the problem the regulators were solving for, and the venue was never the thing that made it dangerous.
The first group experienced a market. The second experienced an insolvency.
The book before this one was about property, and it is already on the shelf. The one after it is about equities, and it is not yet written.
The public masterclass works from the record: what a block is, what a key is, what custody actually means, and what the two books before this one already taught that transfers here — and what does not. The same material, worked through live, for people who learn faster when they can put a question into the room.
Online learning and in-person signing are separate. Bring your Amazon copy to an announced in-person session for your personalised autograph and photograph.
Use the Amazon link on this page. Amazon shows the current format, price, delivery estimate and availability for your location. The Kindle edition delivers on 13 October 2026; hardcover and paperback follow on the same page.
Bring your physical Amazon-purchased copy to a designated in-person masterclass or signing session where Dr. Chiang is present. Subject to the published event arrangements and capacity, he will personalise and autograph your copy and take a photograph with you.
No. Reviews, ratings and review content have no connection to the autograph, the photograph or the masterclass. No benefit is offered in exchange for a review.
No. It contains no price target, no forecast, no allocation guidance and no statement of return — and no returns of the author's own. It sets out what the record shows, how the thing was built, what it survived, and what is still unsettled at the cut-off date of 27 September 2026.
No provider is named anywhere in the book, and none was paid for inclusion or given approval over the text. Appendix D sets out a first purchase mechanically — the order of operations, the costs and the errors that cannot be undone — naming nobody.
If you are impatient, Chapter 12: it asks you to verify one thing yourself, and takes an afternoon. Otherwise read it in order; Part Two is the mechanics the rest of the book is an argument about.
The maintained version of the book's Dated Record, its errata log and the companion to Appendix D, on a domain the author owns that carries no advertising and no product. Chapter 32 explains the arrangement and where its weaknesses are.
No. The book, this site and the masterclass are for general education. Bitcoin is volatile, has fallen by more than three-quarters from its high on four occasions, and its transactions cannot be reversed. Obtain independent professional advice before committing to any asset.
Own Nine Pages on Amazon. Learn the material live with Dr. Clemen Chiang. And when we meet at a designated in-person session, bring your copy for the promise written into this page.
First edition · Spiking Press · Singapore · 2026 · Hardcover 978-981-94-7861-3 · Paperback 978-981-94-7860-6 · Kindle 978-981-94-7859-0