Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin => Development & Technical Discussion => Topic started by: BTC Turkiye on December 07, 2018, 08:41:19 PM



Title: Use of oldest QT wallet
Post by: BTC Turkiye on December 07, 2018, 08:41:19 PM
Can you still download and use the oldest QT wallet I think the one Satoshi published first in Github?
Is it still going to work?


Title: Re: Use of oldest QT wallet
Post by: achow101 on December 07, 2018, 10:15:57 PM
First of all, bitcoin-qt wasn't introduced until 0.5.0. Prior to that, Bitcoin used wxWidgets. Secondly, Satoshi didn't publish his code to Github; Bitcoin wasn't really on Github until after Satoshi left the project.

To answer your question, if you were to use Bitcoin 0.1.0, it would not work. The software can start, but it won't be able to connect to other nodes and be able to sync the blockchain. This is not because consensus has changed, but because P2P protocol has changed a bit so it is now incompatible with the very first version. Furthermore, Bitcoin 0.1.0 would not be able to find any nodes to connect to as the node discovery method has changed.

However, you could create a shim that translates the original protocol messages to the modern protocol messages and be able to speak to a specific other node. You will need to do some other hacks in order to get Bitcoin 0.1.0 to be able to find your node to connect it. Once you can get it connected to another node, it can sync the blockchain. This sync though is extremely slow and it is unlikely that it will be able to sync the blockchain. Unfortunately the database design used originally does not work well with large blocks. In fact, due to the BDB locks issue that caused the fork in 2013, it will probably crash. This can be worked around by increasing the number of BDB locks.


Title: Re: Use of oldest QT wallet
Post by: BTC Turkiye on December 07, 2018, 11:00:18 PM
Thank you very much for the detailed explanation.