An evidence‑first, executable reconstruction and neutral conformance study of the earliest Bitcoin — the November 2008 pre‑release and the January 2009 v0.1.0 genesis client — built entirely from two hash‑verified archives, with nothing disabled and no chain privileged.

Most of Bitcoin's origin story is prose. This lab makes the earliest code run, and lets anyone re‑derive it from scratch.

• common — the umbrella: what "Bitcoin" and "a satoshi" actually are (argued from the artifacts), the honest claims, the neutral conformance + attack‑surface matrices, and the release framing.
• genesis — OBL‑JAN09: the full executable reconstruction of Bitcoin v0.1.0 + derivatives (script engine, UTXO ledger, wallet, P2P, the origin‑distance tracker, and more).
• pre‑genesis — OBL‑NOV08: the Nov 2008 pre‑release witness + source inventory.

• → bitcoin-lab.org — the lab's home: the origin‑distance tracker (how far each Bitcoin version stood from a chosen origin) and the "Is it a Bitcoin?" compass (where an object qualifies as a Bitcoin or a satoshi — and where the answer is convention, not fact). Distance is neutral; the origin is a choice.
• → Join the live network — two always‑on anchors run both reconstructions: JAN09‑X at seed.bitcoin-lab.org:18009 and NOV08‑X at seed.bitcoin-lab.org:18008 (its own genesis + leading‑zero‑bits PoW). Clone the repo and python -m netnode --chain jan09x --datadir ./data --connect seed.bitcoin-lab.org:18009 (or --chain nov08x … :18008) to sync and re‑validate a chain yourself. Experimental. Not money.

• The origin was already a general financial‑predicate engine — full Script, escrow, hash‑locks, a shipped marketplace — at inception; the "programmability came later" story is substantially wrong.
• Bitcoin's early maturation was real safety engineering (the origin shipped the consensus machinery but almost none of the bounds), mapped neutrally, from the origin.
• Two reconstructions — NOV08‑X and JAN09‑X — carry the complete original vocabulary. They are released as candidates ("a Bitcoin"), never as "the Bitcoin": which live network "is" Bitcoin has no factual answer — only convention.

Not money. The experimental chains are stamped "not money" — no premine, no sale, no promises. Authority is only the two hash‑verified archives + the whitepaper; everything else is measured neutrally against them. Reproduce everything with python genesis/scripts/reproduce.py.

MIT © 2026 Parth Mauria Saxena (laboratory tooling); the historical Bitcoin sources retain Satoshi Nakamoto's 2009 MIT notice.