Bitcoin.org Site Blog

Recognizing Recent Efforts By Volunteer Contributors on the Translation Team

Thu, 26 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Through continued donations and support from the community, we’re thankful to have recently been able to send out over $15,000 USD worth of bitcoin as a gesture of gratitude to people who volunteer to help translate bitcoin.org and spread the word about Bitcoin. Each month, contributors are helping localize bitcoin.org so that more people around the world can easily get started and learn more about Bitcoin in their own languages.

Thank you

22296107f24ef76cb1766bc35fd2b3d6
Aliak
Balaxi
Btc4Arab
ChenPoWei
CoinColors
Deadlyweapon
GDP
GIANNAT
Henray0607
JurgenH
Komodorpudel
Rasakila
Sreysros
Trofo
UBS
Vinifire
YummyPT
alanst
amore111
andrew1992
annetypt
bitcoinstein
cocoklogi
cyrilblondel
dalovar
dende93
echo4py
elybon
fariascl
gwb3
hakka
hantolegionosug_gtc_YmM1MT
hoangton
iluvbitcoins
jodaki84
josefelip
klicman
lomik
mareo
mateusnds
meatfreak
miswo
nedved
nejlika
ordtrogen
pansvetadielu456
phung237337
pryds
quellobiondo
raindogdance
rudygodoy
shimhyemin
sitthykun
telstar
thisistolis
tramyargabam
triplay
tsb
vit05
xendez
zshilor
æ‘é•·

How to get involved

Anyone who is fluent in a language that isn’t English can help translate the site. You can get started by following a few basic steps:

Create a free Transifex account.
Browse to the bitcoin.org translation project, find the language you’re fluent in, and join the translation team associated with it.
Once you’re on the team you can start translating. Go to the “Dashboard” on the top of the page, then to “Languages” and select your language. You will see a lot of different resources and their progress. Each resource consists of a number of strings. A string is a “string” of text on bitcoin.org. The first resource (“bitcoin.org”) contains all strings for the main site. You can start there.
Join the Telegram group, feel free to introduce yourself and let people know if you have questions. :)

Special acknowledgments

In addition to the many volunteers, many of the advances and recent progress in the translation project wouldn’t be possible without the help of Simon Hinterreiter and Koichi Hendrawan, who help manage and organize the translation project, as well as the teams.

A special thanks is also owed to Transifex, for providing us with special access to their platform.

About bitcoin.org

Bitcoin.org was originally registered and owned by Satoshi Nakamoto and Martti Malmi. When Satoshi left the project, he gave ownership of the domain to additional people, separate from the Bitcoin developers, to spread responsibility and prevent any one person or group from easily gaining control over the Bitcoin project. Since then, the site has been developed and maintained by different members of the Bitcoin community.

Despite being a privately owned site, its code is open-source and there have been thousands of commits from hundreds of contributors from all over the world. In addition to this, over a thousand translators have helped to make the site display natively to visitors in their own languages — now 25 different languages and growing.

Bitcoin.org receives millions of visitors a year from people all over the world who want to get started with and learn more about Bitcoin.

A New Design for Wallet Pages

Tue, 24 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A new, more user-friendly and simple set of pages designed to help people find an ideal bitcoin wallet is now available. It includes a step-by-step wizard to help people become more familiar with wallets, ratings to compare how they stack up alongside other wallets, as well as explanations of features they provide in order to help people make their own informed decisions. Aside from the wizard, a completely new comparative table and selector is available so people can see how wallets fare against one another. This is designed to help people quickly find a wallet to meet their needs.

Check out the new wallet pages and curate your own list of wallets.

The Old Design

While the old wallet pages presented an assortment of wallets people could choose from, the experience of doing so was cumbersome and tedious. In order to see how wallets were rated one would need to navigate to each individual wallet and then browse back to the overview page to select another wallet to see how the two might compare. It was not possible to see these comparisons side by side. One would need to use multiple tabs or browser windows and toggle back and forth, or a single window, navigating backward and forward.

In addition to the comparative difficulties, millions of people visit bitcoin.org, many of whom are new to Bitcoin, and have little to no familiarity with how it works. This is further complicated when a person needs to choose a bitcoin wallet and has no idea what makes one an optimal choice, what the features are and what they do, or what they need.

The new design resolves these issues by allowing people to easily compare wallets, see how they’re rated and subsequently generate a list of wallets based on available features - in addition to explaining things each step along the way.

Wallet Ratings

Wallets are given one of four ratings - good, acceptable, caution or neutral. These ratings are applied across six categories:

Control: Some wallets give you full control over your bitcoin. This means no third party can freeze or take away your funds. You are still responsible, however, for securing and backing up your wallet.
Validation: Some wallets have the ability to operate as a full node. This means no trust in a third party is required when processing transactions. Full nodes provide a high level of security, but they require a large amount of memory.
Transparency: Some wallets are open-source and can be built deterministically, a process of compiling software which ensures the resulting code can be reproduced to help ensure it hasn’t been tampered with.
Environment: Some wallets can be loaded on computers which are vulnerable to malware. Securing your computer, using a strong passphrase, moving most of your funds to cold store or enabling 2FA or multifactor authentication can help you protect your bitcoin.
Privacy: Some wallets make it harder to spy on your transactions by rotating addresses. They do not disclose information to peers on the network. They can also optionally let you setup and use Tor as a proxy to prevent others from associating transactions with your IP address.
Fees: Some wallets give you full control over setting the fee paid to the bitcoin network before making a transaction, or modifying it afterward, to ensure that your transactions are confirmed in a timely manner without paying more than you have to.

These ratings are available to review both on the overview page that includes all wallets, as well as the individual landing pages for each wallet.

Wallet Features

There are nine features people can choose from to sort wallets by. These features are:

2FA: Two-factor authentication (2FA) is a way to add additional security to your wallet. The first ‘factor’ is your password for your wallet. The second ‘factor’ is a verification code retrieved via text message or from an app on a mobile device. 2FA is conceptually similar to a security token device that banks in some countries require for online banking. It likely requires relying on the availability of a third party to provide the service.
Bech32: Bech32 is a special address format made possible by SegWit (see the feature description for SegWit for more info). This address format is also known as ‘bc1 addresses’. Some bitcoin wallets and services do not yet support sending or receiving to Bech32 addresses.
Full Node: Some wallets fully validate transactions and blocks. Almost all full nodes help the network by accepting transactions and blocks from other full nodes, validating those transactions and blocks, and then relaying them to further full nodes.
Hardware Wallet Compatibility: Some wallets can pair and connect to a hardware wallet in addition to being able to send to them. While sending to a hardware wallet is something most all wallets can do, being able to pair with one is a unique feature. This feature enables you to be able to send and receive directly to and from a hardware wallet.
Legacy Addresses: Most wallets have the ability to send and receive legacy bitcoin addresses. Legacy addresses start with 1 or 3 (as opposed to starting with bc1). Without legacy address support you may not be able to receive bitcoin from older wallets or exchanges.
Lightning: Some wallets support transactions on the Lightning Network. The Lightning Network is new and somewhat experimental. It supports transferring bitcoin without having to record each transaction on the blockchain, resulting in faster transactions and lower fees.
Multisig: Some wallets have the ability to require more than one key to authorize a transaction. This can be used to divide responsibility and control over multiple parties.
SegWit: Some wallets support SegWit, which uses block chain space more efficiently. This helps reduce fees paid by helping the Bitcoin network scale and sets the foundation for second layer solutions such as the Lightning Network.

People can select features that are important to them alongside the ratings described above, based on their operating system and/or environment.

Acknowledgments

The new wallet page improvements wouldn’t have been possible without donations from the community, as well as community feedback that we received as various milestones were passed and presented along the way. A special thanks is also due to several people who spent a significant amount of their personal time on this project - Craig Watkins, Cøbra, Natalia Kirejczyk, Alex Cherman, and Maxwell Mons. Lastly, we appreciate the efforts of many contributors that spent time reporting issues on GitHub with regard to both the old and new design, that we were able to resolve as part of this work:

Adding a Wallet

For people who would like to submit a wallet that isn’t listed on the site for potential inclusion, documentation is available for review.

Feedback

If you have any feedback on the new wallet pages, ideas on how they can be made better, or if you’ve encountered a problem, please let us know by opening an issue on GitHub.

About bitcoin.org

Bitcoin.org receives millions of visitors a year from people all over the world who want to get started with and learn more about Bitcoin.

Bitcoin.org Content Now Available in 25+ Languages

Thu, 14 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Bitcoin is Spreading

Over the the past year, as part of Bitcoin.org’s ongoing content translation initiative to help spread information about Bitcoin all around the world, many people have helped extend and update the site into their own native languages.

Thanks to community donations and a sponsorship from Paxful, translators throughout 2018 received bitcoin bonuses in appreciation for the time and efforts that they had spent volunteering. Bitcoin.org content is available in 25+ languages including:

Arabic
Bulgarian
Danish
Dutch
English
Farsi
French
German
Greek
Hindi
Hungarian
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Mandarin
Polish
Portuguese (Brazilian)
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Slovenian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish

As the original website domain registered by Satoshi Nakamoto in association with the technology, and one of the first results people encounter when searching the web for more information about Bitcoin, this accomplishment enables billions of people to potentially learn more about it and how to get started using it as easily as possible. Also, despite being a privately owned site, Bitcoin.org’s code is open-source. There have been thousands of commits and contributions from hundreds of contributors and translators. The open source nature by which the site is run, helps to ensure that new users are still able to find unbiased and qualitative information about Bitcoin, to make their own informed decisions about which products and services might be the optimal choice for them to use.

In 2019, translation coverage will continue to expand across the site into areas where translated content previously wasn’t available, areas such as the developer documentation, for example.

If you speak English and another language and would like to help spread the word about Bitcoin, it’s easy to get started!

Thanks goes to everyone who contributes to make this possible.

How to Help Translate Bitcoin.org

Fri, 14 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re a fluent or native speaker of a language other than English, this blog post will help you learn how to get started translating Bitcoin.org so that more people around the world who speak your language can learn about Bitcoin.

Thank you to Simon AKA “Komodorpudel” for preparing content to help organize this post.

Getting Started with the Translation Team

Translations for Bitcoin.org are done on a website called Transifex. Basic instructions for how Transifex works can be found here.

Below is a summary:

Create a free Transifex account. Creating a Transifex account is free and not much information is needed.
Join the Bitcoin.org translation team and select the language you want to translate the site into. Your request to join a team will be accepted instantly, and you will be a translator for the language you selected. If your language is not available yet, close the pop-up, scroll down, and navigate to “Request language”.
Play around with the interface. Transifex’s interface can be a bit confusing and it cannot hurt to take a look around. As a translator, you cannot cause any harm as you can only edit unreviewed strings. A complete history is saved for every string, making it impossible to destroy previous work. In the beginning, stay away from the Glossary as this can be edited by new translators but no history is saved.
Join the Telegram group for translators. The website maintainer, both team leaders for translations, a number of language coordinators, and various translators are present in this group. We are happy to help in case you need assistance.
Choose what you want to translate. Navigate to the “Dashboard” on the top of the page, then to “Languages” and select your language. You will see a lot of different resources and their progress. Each resource consists of a number of strings. A string is a “string” of text on Bitcoin.org. Each string has three possible states - “untranslated”, “translated but unreviewed”, and “reviewed”. Only the first state “untranslated” is relevant for most translators. However, if you find a “translated but unreviewed” string that contains obvious mistakes, you are free to correct them. “Reviewed” strings can only be changed or unreviewed by reviewers. The first resource “bitcoin.org” contains all strings of the main page. Start here. Everything else that follows starts with “devdocs…”, indicating that these files are part of the developer documentation. It is recommended that you only try to translate the developer documentation if you are an experienced Bitcoin user and/or developer with a profound understanding.
Start translating. You must be a native or fluent speaker for the language you choose to translate. Please be careful to preserve the original meaning of each text. Sentences and popular expressions should sound native in your language. Translations need to be reviewed by a reviewer or coordinator before publication. Once reviewed, coordinators will notify the team leaders that a certain translation is ready for publication. If in doubt, please contact the coordinator(s) for your language on Transifex.
Please take a look at the Responsibilities and Tasks section below to learn more about the different types of users that you’ll encounter on Transifex when helping translate Bitcoin.org.

Responsibilities and Tasks

Team Leaders

Team Leaders are currently George AKA “BitcoinTranslations” and Hendrawan AKA “khendraw”.

Responsibilities and Tasks

Providing oversight on the complete translation efforts on Transifex.
Keeping track of everything.
Being a contact person for all sorts of questions that cannot be answered by language coordinators.
Promoting or demoting users (e.g. promoting a reviewer to coordinator).
Managing groups that have no active coordinator.

Coordinators

Various people across all language teams are coordinators. For a number of languages, no active coordinator exists. If there are any questions or you want to assist by becoming a coordinator, please write one of the team leaders.

Responsibilities and Tasks

Translating and striving for consistency across strings.
Providing oversight on the complete translation efforts for a specific language.
Notifying team leaders if a resource is ready to be put on the website.
Being a contact person for the team leaders.
Being a contact person for all reviewers and translators within a specific language team.
Introducing and helping new volunteers.
Promoting or demoting users (e.g. promoting a translator to reviewer).
Removing user that do not follow instructions (e.g. using Google Translate).

Reviewers

Responsibilities and Tasks

Translating and striving for consistency across strings.
Reviewing strings (preferably not their own strings if possible).
Checking translations for correctness regarding meaning and spelling.
Checking for consistency across translations (e.g. is “transaction malleability” translated consistently across all strings?).

Translators

Responsibilities and Tasks

Translating and striving for consistency across strings.
Extending the glossary with translations for necessary and general terms.

About Bitcoin.org

Despite being a privately owned site, its code is open-source and there have been over 3,200 commits from 180 contributors from all over the world. In addition to this, over 950 translators have helped to make the site display natively to visitors by default in their own languages — now 25 different languages and growing.

A Big Thanks to Recent Translators

Fri, 07 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Acknowledging Recent Translators

Thanks to a sponsorship from Paxful, the following volunteer translators who have been the most active contributors in recent months are being given bitcoin for their efforts:

Abegi
FrancescoGalati
JurgenH
Kasvain
Komodorpudel
Kruell233
MedMus
Rasakila
Thalesfcastro
Vinifire
YummyPT
alanst
alexandra.cg15
bernat
buren
chrisper
cocoklogi
crynvestor
dalovar
def1ne
echo4py
enriquecartagena
excess
fjrojasgarcia
hzxswyg
icarius
isty98
karin.garri
klicman
learningis1st
luggi5711
manuelarodsilva
mariofgf14
mateusnds
mjglqw
mreza73
natsam
nedved
paolobaz
peto.juhasz
pryds
quellobiondo
rodlin
simonLimon
sitthykun
trior
vit05
Василий33

A big thanks goes to these volunteers. Their work behind the scenes shouldn’t go unnoticed, and we dedicate this blog post to recognizing them.

Each month, more and more people all around the world are hearing, reading and learning more about Bitcoin. Seeing a business with a “Bitcoin accepted here” sign may not be something rare for some of us anymore… but it still is for many in a lot of places. Even though Bitcoin adoption is spreading like wildfire, we haven’t even scratched the surface of what could be possible. In order for knowledge to spread, information has to be freed to transmit easily from person to person, across borders, across languages, between cultures, philosophies, religions and ideologies. Some people say we are all Satoshi, now. For that to ring true, we must find our voice to speak, spread and support Bitcoin as one.

There have been tens of millions of visitors to Bitcoin.org this year alone. About half of them speak English. The rest are millions of visitors speaking all kinds of other languages from across the globe. For them, we rely on volunteer translators - like the above individuals - people who translate Bitcoin.org into their own native languages so that when people who speak them come to Bitcoin.org, the site displays by default in their own native tongue.

There are currently 70 languages in various states of translation, 27 of which have reached states of completion that have enabled them to be added to Bitcoin.org. In addition, earlier this year, the developer documentation was ported so that it could also start to be translated into other languages. It’s important that we provide a way to help a new generation of Bitcoin developers in non English-speaking countries learn more about Bitcoin on a technical level, to help foster the development of new products and services, for the people in their communities who are already interested in using it.

As one of the most visited Bitcoin websites, translating Bitcoin.org is a great way to help Bitcoin continue to spread.

If you want to be like one of the people above and join the effort, learn how to get started.

A special thanks also goes to Simon AKA “Komodorpudel” who has spent a lot of time co-organizing various translation-related efforts. Thank you, Simon. Lastly, but not least, to Transifex, for graciously providing enterprise-grade localization services to support Bitcoin.org.