How Bitcoin Looked 11 Years Ago

I rebuilt the earliest version of Bitcoin software I could find (with some bugfixes) and here is what I found.

Bitcoin Logo History

The very first logo made by Satoshi contained two characters: B and C and looked this way:

The original Satoshi logo

Possibly there is one more proof of that which largely went unnoticed. Look at this screenshot to find it:

It’s a bug maybe, or a feature pretending to be a bug

Later in February 2010 Satoshi decided to move to a one character version of a logo which everyone recognizes by now:

The second version of a logo by Satoshi, went incredibly popular

Hidden features

When I was building the original Bitcoin wallet software I noticed there are some unused windows present in the resources and also some code is left unused too. They are most obvious to find in wxWidgets form editor. For example, here is a window for a product editor in some kind of a an online marketplace:

Edit Product form window

That one is known. But I’m pretty sure you never heard of a poker being in the early version of Bitcoin!

Satoshi actually added some preliminary support for playing poker in Bitcoin!

Sending Bitcoins to IP-address

The preferred way to send bitcoins back then was to specify IP address of a receiving Bitcoin wallet. Furthermore, you could even attach a text message for your transaction! (it would not be stored in the blockchain though). So traditional 1… Bitcoin address was required only if the recipient was not online.

Send window from earliest Bitcoin wallet

There are many more interesting things to learn from that. If there is enough interest I can publish binaries and we can try to see how it looked live instead of screenshots 😉

My Github repo containing the version of Bitcoin wallet I used to produce above mentioned screenshots

submitted by /u/abragin
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