Check out the original Bitcoin client

Hey folks. I just rolled out the first version of the Bitcoin client. Honestly, I'm shocked that it actually works. It creates a whole new blockchain, and the block reward is 50 coins. Feels like a blast from the past. Super fascinating stuff. Give it a shot if you're curious.

An alternative blockchain? Which version of Core did you run? Tell us the version number.

He might have created a DIY blockchain and named it with a Bitcoin client, but it's not the real first version of core since it generates an alternative blockchain. Source: Build Your Own Blockchain

He also could used guide or service that fork Bitcoin Core with little modification (e.g. different genesis block and address prefix). Either way, OP is definitely not talking about Bitcoin as we know.

I've been wanting to do something similar as an educational exercise: build the original satoshi client and then push the changes version by version to see how the client evolved over time. This is the place I found to download the original client v0.1 : https://github.com/0xMagnuz/Bitcoin-v0.1/tree/master/bitcoin0.1 Slightly different than the OP, but if anyone has any resources related to this side-quest, or threads here on bitcointalk to go to, would be much appreciated.

If you're also interested in the pre-release source code (before v0.1), it's posted in this site with references to Bitcointalk posts. Link: satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/code Then, the rest are in the reference client's GitHub commit history, Starting from: github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits/master/?after=4b1d48a6866b24f0ed027334c6de642fc848d083+45035 The listed "First Commit" is v0.1.5 Alpha, older versions are in the link above.

There are good reasons to doubt the faithfulness of that code, it's fragmentary and its source has told indisputable lies about the early history of Bitcoin.  So take it with a grain of salt.

I'm just interested in tracking how we got to the core client as it is today so all I care about is the Jan 9th release -- v0.1.0, as that's the code that first instantiated the network. I've been working through v0.1.0 and it's been super educative tbh, highly recommend it. I saw that v0.1.3 is on the nakamoto insitute link you provided above so I think i'm all set there (thx) as step two, but since the "first commit" you linked to on github just posts the entire v0.1.5 codebase, what's the easiest way to tell what changed from v0.1.3 to v0.1.5? From then on I'm assuming all the changes are tracked through version control, even though early on it was all still pre-github... Hope these comments are still germane to this thread as I'm moving away from v0.1.0.

You can still use git, the only thing that you can't do is use Github as in the website and compare within the current repository where the Bitcoin code is as they don't have that branch. You can make a local repository on your machine for any old codebase and then create a new branch with the newer one and compare them. You can use git diff or maybe even the desktop GUI client to get an overview of the differences. I would try this myself but for some reason I can't even open the v0.1.3 archive.