Is This Satoshi Nakamoto’s Long Lost Earliest Version Of The Bitcoin Code?

The legend of Satoshi Nakamoto lives on. A bitcoin enthusiast that 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 kicker: the code is still in Soundforge. That is, Satoshi Nakamoto’s original code disappeared from search engines and was considered lost for ten years, but “using some browser hacking” Blasko realized the files were still up there. How can anyone fake that kind of discovery?

According to Jim Blasko, “the official oldest known uploaded copy of Satoshi’s Bitcoin v0.1” is here and here.\

The Satoshi Nakamoto Story, By Jim Blasko

The facebook post with which Blasko announced his discovery is full of bitcoin history. For example:

“Satoshi released his first statement on the Cypherpunks cryptography mailer on Jan 8th 2009, with a link to his freshly uploaded Bitcoin.v0.1.rar on soundforge. He had been CPU mining Bitcoin for 5 days (since Jan 3rd) with the difficulty factor of only 0 when he went public on the 8th.”

A time when bitcoin CPU mining was a thing, can you imagine? “Since 2012 it was thought that the raw code and the files were gone as they had been scraped from the soundforge search engine for some reason,” Blasko writes. He half-speculates-half-remembers that it was due to some kind of vulnerability the developers didn’t want out there until the code was stable. Ten years later, it’s harmless. However, can we be sure this “Bitcoin version 0.1, the original pure raw data and files”? It certainly seems that way.

Satoshi Nakamoto’s Personal Notations

There’s lore behind this code. Apparently, “Hal Finney was planning to email it to some people in 2012” but didn’t because of his health. However, Satoshi Nakamoto’s notations take the cake.

“To those of you that are hardcore cryptoheads like me, this is quite a cool discovery as it has all of Satoshi’s personal notations in the code, and hasn’t been changed by anyone this early. Sure other v0.1’s exist on github but I didn’t find one posted previous to 2016. I know this to be the cleanest original version of Bitcoin!”

For example, Satoshi Nakamoto answers the question: “Why base-58 instead of standard base-64 encoding?”

“- Don’t want 0OIl characters that look the same in some fonts and could be used to create visually identical looking account numbers.
– A string with non-alphanumeric characters is not as easily accepted as an account number.
– E-mail usually won’t line-break if there’s no punctuation to break at.
– Doubleclicking selects the whole number as one word if it’s all alphanumeric.”

BTC price chart for 10/08/2022 on Bittrex | Source: BTC/USD on TradingView.com

Six Months To Mine One Million Bitcoin

This one is interesting and painful. According to Jim Blasko:

“Satoshi would take at least 6 months to mine 1 million Bitcoin as block 20,000 wouldn’t come until July 22nd 2009 and others like Hal where mining as well, so at least this time or shortly there after. Difficulty was only 1 at the time and basic cpu mining would continue for a couple years.”

The bitcoin enthusiast’s facebook post also contains a copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s original message to the “The Cryptography Mailing List” informing them about bitcoin. It contains this gem of a phrase that relates to the story above:

“I made the proof-of-work difficulty ridiculously easy to start with, so for a little while in the beginning a typical PC will be able to generate coins in just a few hours. It’ll get a lot harder when competition makes the automatic adjustment drive up the difficulty.”

The difficulty adjustment, just one of bitcoin’s many wonders. Thank you, Satoshi!