I am quite fascinated by the history of the development of Bitcoin, As I covered in my post about the history of Bitcoin’s ideas Ingredients of Bitcoin. - there were several notable precursors to the invention of Bitcoin. This post is specifically focused on looking at the code of Bitcoin.

The first versions of Bitcoin

Bitcoin has massively evolved since the early days of the code on Sourceforge. There are some links to the older sources in TGZ and RAR formats on the Nakamoto Institute pages:

• Pre-release - November 16, 2008 MD5: e9492e326512b55208c7d9f1db23e35a
• Bitcoin v0.1.0 - January 9, 2009 MD5: 91e2dfa2af043eabbb38964cbf368500
• Bitcoin v0.1.3 - January 14, 2009 MD5: 9a73e0826d5c069091600ca295c6d224

Predecessor Code

In 1998, what is perhaps the most relevant to the development of Bitcoin is the of BitGold by Hal Finney which can be found here on archive.org. The original concept of BitGold was written by Nick Szabo also in 1998 - although I have only been able to find his 2005 references to the idea, there is a copyright on this page dated 1999 which looks like it is from a 2013/2014 snapshot of Nick’s homepage on szabo.best.vwh.net that contains some code snippets.