The legend of Satoshi Nakamoto lives on. A bitcoin enthusiast who goes by Jim Blasko claims to have found “the lost Bitcoin v0.1 raw data and files”. Skepticism would be the normal reaction to outlandish claims like these, but here’s the rub: the code is still on Soundforge. That is, Satoshi Nakamoto’s original code disappeared from search engines and was considered lost for ten years, but “using a little browser hacking” Blasko realized that the files were still up there. How can anyone fake this kind of discovery?
According to Jim Blasko, “the oldest known uploaded official copy of Satoshi’s Bitcoin v0.1” is here i here.
The Story of Satoshi Nakamoto, by Jim Blasko
The facebook post with which Blasko announced that its discovery is steeped in bitcoin history. For example:
“Satoshi posted his first statement on the Cypherpunks cryptomail on January 8, 2009, with a link to his Bitcoin.v0.1.rar recently uploaded to Soundforge. He had been mining Bitcoin for 5 days (since 3 January) with a difficulty factor of only 0 when it went public on the 8th”.
A time when bitcoin CPU mining was a thing, can you imagine? “Since 2012 the raw code and files were thought to be gone as they were deleted from the Soundforge search engine for some reason,” writes Blasko. I half-speculate-half-remember that it was because of some kind of vulnerability that the developers didn’t want until the code was stable. Ten years later, it’s harmless. However, can we be sure that this “Bitcoin version 0.1, the original pure raw data and files”? It certainly seems that way.
Personal notations of Satoshi Nakamoto
There is tradition behind this code. Apparently, “Hal Finney planned to email it to some people in 2012,” but he didn’t because of his health. However, Satoshi Nakamoto’s annotations take the cake.
“For those of you who are cryptoheads like me, this is a great find as it has all of Satoshi’s personal annotations in the code and no one has changed it so soon. I’m sure there are other v0.1’s on github, but I haven’t found any published before 2016. I know this is the cleanest original version of Bitcoin!”
For example, Satoshi Nakamoto answers the question: “Why base-58 instead of the standard base-64 encoding?”
“- I don’t want 0OIl characters that look the same in some fonts and can be used to create visually identical account numbers.
– A string with non-alphanumeric characters is not as easily accepted as an account number.
– Usually email will not break the line if there are no punctuation marks.
– Double clicking selects the entire number as a word if it is all alphanumeric.
BTC price chart for 10/08/2022 on Bittrex | Source: BTC/USD on TradingView.com
Six months to mine a million bitcoins
This one is interesting and painful. According to Jim Blasko:
“It would take Satoshi at least 6 months to mine 1 million bitcoins, as block 20,000 wouldn’t arrive until July 22, 2009, and others like Hal would also be mining, so at least this time or soon after. The difficulty was just 1 at the time and core CPU mining would continue for a couple of years.”
The bitcoin enthusiast’s Facebook post also contains a copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s original message to the “Cryptography Mailing List” informing them about bitcoin. It contains this gem of a sentence that relates to the above story:
“I made the difficulty of the proof of work ridiculously easy to start with, so for a while at the beginning a typical computer will be able to generate coins in a few hours. It will be much harder when the competition makes the auto-adjust increase the difficulty”.
Difficulty adjustment, just one of the many wonders of bitcoin. Thanks Satoshi!
Featured Image by Mike Bludau on Unsplash | Charts by TradingView
