The original code was thought to have been lost for more than a decade and, thanks to a “small hack of the browser“, Blasko was able to find the raw data and lost files of version 0.1 stored on sourceforge.net.
Bitcoiner recovers the “cleanest original version of bitcoin” that was thought to be lost forever.
For more than a decade, it was believed that Satoshi Nakamoto’s 0.1 code base was lost. If one searches, it is extremely difficult to find and some people have discovered pieces of the code. Bitcoiner Jim Blasko revealed on October 7, through a Facebook post, that by using a little bit of browser hacking, he was able to recover the long-lost code. After explaining a bit of the story, Jim Blasko said that it took the bitcoin creator about six months to extract the inventor’s one million euro stash.
“Satoshi would need at least 6 months to mine 1 million bitcoins“, Blasko’s post explains. “Since block 20,000 would not arrive until July 22, 2009, and others like Hal Finney were also mining, so at least this time or shortly after. The difficulty was only 1 at the time and CPU based mining would continue for a few years“. In addition, the bitcoiner explained that in late August 2009, Martti Malmi uploaded the raw code of Bitcoin v0.1 to sourceforge.net.
“Since 2012, it was thought that the raw code and files were gone because they had been scraped from the Sourceforge search engine for some reason“, Blasko’s post states. “I know that many users had been looking for the original v0.1 code for a very long time, and Hal Finney was planning to email it to some people in 2012, but his health was poor and, by his own account, he wasn’t logging on much to respond“, adds the crypto researcher.
Jim Blasko’s post continues:
I’m not sure if Hal sent it, as he was the first to receive the Bitcoin v0.1 code from Satoshi. Anyway, I did some research and was able to find the original code still on Sourceforge using a pirate browser.
Thanks to Blasko’s discovery, one can find the hidden code downloaded on August 30, 2009. here and here. Blasko’s discovery is unique in that it is the very first version of Bitcoin presented in an unaltered fashion and it contains all of Satoshi’s personal notations in the first code base. Jim Blasko stated that he was aware that there are existing versions of the Bitcoin 0.1 codebase on Github, however, he believes that these are “the cleanest original version of Bitcoin“.
In the code base, Nakamoto explains things like why base 58 was chosen instead of the standard base 64 encoding, and other notations like the things the inventor planned to “do” later in the future. There is also an excellent description of the original Bitcoin opcodes and what each one does. Opcodes such as OP_CHECKSIG, OP_CHECKSIGVERIFY, OP_CHECKMULTISIG and OP_CHECKMULTISIGVERIFY.