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Sleuth Discovers Satoshi’s Long-Lost Bitcoin Version 0.1 Codebase, Raw Code Contains Bitcoin Inventor’s Never-Before-Seen Personal Notations – Bitcoin News
On October 7, 2022, a bitcoin supporter named Jim Blasko explained that he discovered the oldest upload of Bitcoin’s version 0.1 codebase. The original code was believed to have been lost for more than a decade, and with a “little browser hacking”, Blasko was able to find the lost version 0.1 raw data and files stored on sourceforge.net.
Bitcoins scrape up the “purest original version of Bitcoin” which is believed to be lost forever
For well over ten years, Satoshi Nakamoto’s version 0.1 codebase was believed to be lost. If one were to search, it is extremely difficult to find, and some people have discovered bits and pieces of the code. Bitcoiner Jim Blasko revealed on October 7 via a Facebook post that, using a touch of browser hacking, he was able to scrape up the long-lost code. After explaining some history, Blasko described that it took Bitcoin’s creator about six months to mine the inventor’s stash of 1 million BTC.
“Satoshi would take at least 6 months to mine 1 million bitcoins,” explains Blasko’s post. “As block 20,000 would not arrive until July 22, 2009, and others such as Hal [Finney] was also mining, so at least this time or shortly after. [The network’s difficulty] was only 1 at the time and basic [CPU] mining would continue for a couple of years.” Furthermore, the bitcoiner explained that at the end of August 2009, Martti Malmi uploaded the raw code of Bitcoin v0.1 to sourceforge.net.
“Since 2012, it has been assumed that the raw code and files were missing as they had been scraped from the Sourceforge search engine for some reason,” Blasko’s post said. “I know many users [were] Been looking for the original v0.1 code for a very long time and Hal Finney planned to email it to a few people in 2012 but his health was poor and by his own words he didn’t get online much to answer, says the crypto researcher. add.
Blasko’s post continues:
I’m not sure if Hal ever sent it out, since Hal was the earliest to receive Bitcoin v0.1 code from Satoshi. Anyway, I did some digging and I was able to find the original code still on Sourceforge using browser hacking.
Via Blasko’s discovery, the hidden code uploaded on August 30, 2009 can be found here and here. Blasko’s discovery is unique because it is the very first version of Bitcoin presented in an untampered way, and it contains all of Satoshi’s personal notations in the early codebase. Blasko said he was aware that there are existing versions of Bitcoin version 0.1’s codebase on Github, but he believes it is “the purest original version of Bitcoin.”
In the codebase, Nakamoto explains things like why base-58 was chosen instead of the standard base-64 encoding, and other notations as things the inventor planned to “do” later in the future. There is also a great description of the original Bitcoin operation codes (op codes) and what each one does. Opcodes such as OP_CHECKSIG, OP_CHECKSIGVERIFY, OP_CHECKMULTISIG and OP_CHECKMULTISIGVERIFY.
What do you think of Jim Blasko’s early discovery of the Bitcoin codebase? Let us know what you think about this topic in the comments section below.
Image credit: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons, Editorial image credit: Valery Brozhinsky / Shutterstock.com and Sourceforge
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