Historical IRC Logs and Archive

[nathmaroal]

Hi all, I'm trying to recover some archived IRC chats from 2011-2015 of #bitcoin-dev on freenode.

I've tried multiples ways, Bitcoinstats seems unavailable. Tried also to ask some historical members who seemed to be archiving chats at the time. No one responded.

It was already discussed back then..
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=986.0

But the mentionned website is not active anymore
http://veritas.maximilianeum.ch/bitcoin/irc/logs/

Even tried some InternetArchives of some Logs, some pages still exists, but its defenetly not complete enough.

I've identified other initiatives, but many of them weren't archiving the correct channel, or at the correct timing.
https://gnusha.org/
https://bitcoin-irc.chaincode.com/bitcoin-core-dev/2025-12-01


Any leads welcomed.

[BattleDog]

Historically, the canonical logger for #bitcoin-dev on Freenode was bitcoinstats.com, and a lot of blog posts / papers still link to URLs like bitcoinstats.com/irc/bitcoin-dev/logs/2012/....
When that site disappeared, there was never an official public mirror of the flat log files, so what you're seeing now is just fossils... broken links, partial Wayback captures...

One place you haven't mentioned that's actually promising is FLOSSmole. They imported the full #bitcoin-dev IRC logs into a MySQL dataset years ago, specifically from the original bitcoinstats flat files, and still list "bitcoin-dev" as one of the IRC channels they host data for. Access isn't a click-and-download thing, but they explain how to get at the database on their site.
I'd start by getting an account there and dumping that table.

[nathmaroal]

Thanks a lot for this.

Been scrolling through archives and it appears that their SQL database is not accessible as you mentionned (https://web.archive.org/web/20240518030729/https://flossmole.org/content/bitcoin-dev-ubuntu-perl6-django-puppet-irc-logs-are-updated). Unfortunately it’s no longer possible to create new accounts on FLOSSmole either as their mailing list seems to have disapeared (https://sourceforge.net/projects/ossmole/support).

I’ve been trying since this morning to reach the server, but access seems completely restricted. Also, even if there are partial copies of IRC logs and related resources on Internet Archive (https://web.archive.org/web/20241007221035/http://flossdata.syr.edu/data/), and on a static server they kept online (https://code.google.com/archive/p/flossmole/downloads), I haven’t found the actual MySQL dump that contains the full dataset we need. Most mirrors only include fragments or incomplete logs, not the structured database.

If anyone knows of a verified source for the original SQL file or has a local copy, please share.

[BattleDog]

There are a couple of real leads beyond FLOSSmole.

First, Bryan Bishop (kanzure) is hosting a big tarball of IRC logs here: https://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin/bitcoin-logs.2010-2018.tar.bz2
It's ~42 MB and labeled 2010-2018, so it's not just a couple of random days. I can't vouch for the exact channel layout from here, but given the rest of that directory (bitcoin-dev, mailing list mirrors, etc.) it's very likely to contain the #bitcoin-dev material you're after, or at least a huge chunk of it.

Second, if you really want from the original source, the old bitcoinstats logs are partially preserved on the Wayback Machine. A direct example: https://web.archive.org/web/20131201200415/http://bitcoinstats.com/irc/bitcoin-dev/logs/2011/12/31 is a full day's transcript.
The Princeton CITP folks even wrote about scraping current vs Wayback versions and confirmed that a lot of days are archived there, though there are some holes and inconsistencies.
If the diyhpl tarball somehow doesn't pan out, the "nuclear option" is to script against Wayback's CDX API for https://bitcoinstats.com/irc/bitcoin-dev/logs/* and reconstruct day-by-day from the snapshots.

For FLOSSmole: you already saw Megan's note that #bitcoin-dev logs were imported into their MySQL instance and that they deliberately didn't re-host the flat files because those were supposed to stay at the original sites.
Given that the MySQL box and account process are now effectively closed, I wouldn't bet on getting a SQL dump out of them unless one of the maintainers surfaces.

It's annoying that the "official" preservation story for such an important channel boils down to "some hackers' home dirs and the Wayback Machine", but that's pretty on brand for Bitcoin history.