Some early OG’s that can help me out? I remember mining in 2008 with a quite sophisticated client on Windows, it had an address book and showed connections in the status bar. I’ve also read some paper from usenet about a digital currency. But the Bitcoin Whitepaper is from October 31, 2008, which could check out, but the first block was mined Janurary 3, 2009. The client looked odfully similar to bitcoin-qt, but that one was released on 21 November 2011, so what was I mining at that time?
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The readme from the bitcoin 0.1 client implies that there was a graphical user interface already:
“To support the network by running a node, select:
Options->Generate Coins”
A preview release is from November 16, 2008, which would check out.
Does anyone has info what that preview release did? Was there some testnet before bitcoin was launched?
There was a net with different coinbase hash in 2007, and a concept of proof source with just the basics, 3 cpp files or so... almost sure it was not a Windows app by then... afaik all versions ever in the wild where at least able to mine and connect to to other clients. The coins before 03.01 where all (testcoins) minted over that early conbase
Guess I could search the Usenet Historical Collection on archive.org which dates back 30 years, but those are thousands of collections, each containing tens of thousands zip files, not even remembering which usenet group it was.