Here I highlight the earliest reports of bitcoin in any type of publicly accessible media, either a tech site, software publishing site, mainstream sites, news, etc. I think the PC World article at the end of 2010 seems to be already mainstream, so anything after that is not really that relevant to this post. I'm mostly interested in what happened before that. If you happen to know of any article that was written and published in 2009 or early 2010, please mention it here.
Here's what I've found so far:
The first publicly known announcement of Bitcoin appeared in the metzdowd cryptography mailing list on October 2008[1]. At this time bitcoin is mostly known to people involved in cryptography.
On January 8th 2009 the first public release of bitcoin software is done at sourceforge[2], a website where people can host and download open source software. This means that now people involved in software development or software enthusiasts in general might also know about bitcoin.
On January 11th 2009, Hal Finney famously twitted "Running bitcoin"[3]. Now potentially anyone with a twitter account might have gotten some kind of exposure to the concept of bitcoin, and might be able to obtain more information about it through the sourceforge forum or source code.
On March 2009 a bitcoin entry appears on wikipedia[4], allowing the general population to know more about what bitcoin is.
On November 2009 bitcointalk forum is created[5]. This means that anyone in the world now might end up knowing about bitcoin by simply doing a web search about related topics that are covered in this forum.
On July 2010 bitcoin is discussed in slashdot[6], a website for tech news.
On December 2010, PC World wrote an article about a potential new virtual currency called Bitcoin[7]. This is probably the most mainstream reference to Bitcoin at the time.
I think I'm missing at least a couple of relevant articles that might have appeared around 2009 at places like slashdot, hackernews, or similar. Anyone here has any links from that time?
[1]:
https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-October/014810.html[2]:
https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2009-January/014994.html[3]:
https://nitter.it/halfin/status/1110302988[4]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bitcoin&oldid=275832581[5]:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5.msg28#msg28[6]:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/10/07/11/1747245/Bitcoin-Releases-Version-03[7]:
https://www.pcworld.com/article/499375/could_wikileaks_scandal_lead_to_new_virtual_currency.html
