Bitcoin Forum

Hello World.

So I wanted to find out how the first bitcoin core looked like and if it was able to connect to the main network. Unfortunately, it could not. The look is very basic. I also have a very old wallet which I want to test out if transactions could be made from it.

I am not sure how to do it, is there any one who can compile from source code so it can connect to the main network?

Here is the link to Bitcoin Core v0.1.3:
https://github.com/trottier/original-bitcoin

Thanks in advance.  :)

bitcoin 2009 vs bitcoin core 2019 are vastly different
a few changes around the 0.7.x 0.8.x made it so certain things wont b compatible
same again with 0.12.x onwards too

most clients today wont even attempt to connect to anything before 0.12 nor 0.07 nor 0.1.3

the only possible way is to change your own modern client to communicate to it as a bridge. and change a few things in the old client too.. but then that defeats the purpose of your experiment.

however if you are interested in just spending the funds of the very old wallet you can do that on the modern clients

not sure about 0.1.3, but 0.1 connected to other peers over an irc server (which is a geeky chat platform), I suspect that the irc server Satoshi set up for doing this job isn't running any more :D


@gmaxwell recently said that Bitcoin 0.1 will connect to other bitcoin nodes and start syncing, but that waiting for it to catch up the whole thing takes months. He also mentioned that you need to change the BDB code to permit > 500KB blocks, as the original 4.8 version choked on > 500KB for some reason.

So it can supposedly be done, according to someone who's tried at least.

Hello.

So Bitcoin 0.1 will connect? Do you happen to have an .exe link somewhere so I can test it out?

P.S. All the ones I found online are 0.1.1. and they won't connect  :(

Thanks

no

take a look at the code, does it read a peers.dat file into a data structure from the config directory? If yes, you could run a modern version of Bitcoin to collect some peer IP addresses (you'll need to find other peers with older versions too) into it's peer.dat, then copy that into the config dir for the bitcoin 0.1 executable. If not, you'll have to make the changes to the 0.1.3 source to either read a pre-populated peers.dat file, or implement the DNS seeder code into 0.1 source, and compile it successfully. The code to read the peers.dat file is gonna be easier, I would expect. It'll still get stuck when you sync the first block >500 KB, on account of that problem with unpatched BDB library

Well thanks, but I am not sure I can do any of those things. Let me know if you or perhaps someone who knows how to do it will be up to the challenge! The best way would probably be to look at source code and change the peers to modern ones and then compile it so it would look for modern peers and would possibly connect.