BITCOINERS MEET BITCOINERS

Real-time communication protocol IRC doesn’t see much action today, but in the early 2000s and 2010s, it was all the rage among open-source tech communities. Developed in 1988 by Finland’s Jarkko Oikarinen, its architecture, comprising a decentralised network of servers, very much aligned with that of Bitcoin.

It was inevitable that the early Bitcoin community should assemble here to hold private conversations and troubleshoot issues with connecting to the fledgling cryptocurrency network. And there was one task in particular that the #bitcoin and #bitcoin-dev IRC channels were ideally suited to: supporting peer discovery by allowing those running Bitcoin to connect their nodes.

Within 24 hours of Bitcoin’s public launch, the #bitcoin channel was up and running, with records showing Hal Finney connecting to it on January 10th, 2009 and receiving an IRC message listing two peers’ IP addresses – one of which corresponded to Satoshi’s node. By mid-2010, the #bitcoin-dev channel was ticking over nicely, enabling node bootstrapping and forming a hangout where devs could address various minor – and occasionally major – bugs in the Bitcoin protocol.

Satoshi Lurking

Satoshi Nakamoto was a regular lurker on Bitcoin’s IRC channels, even if he kept the bulk of his public communications for the Bitcointalk forum, perhaps favouring its ability to keep a permanent record of conversations. In October 2010, for example, when an early miner bragged in the #bitcoin-dev channel about high hashpower, Satoshi popped up on the forum to ask “Seriously? What hardware is that?,” implying he learned via IRC that GPUs were mining.

Indeed, if there’s one event the earliest available IRC logs truly capture, it’s the emergence of GPU miners, which by mid-2010 had displaced CPUs as the primary means of mining bitcoin. One notorious early miner, ArtForz, was an active IRC participant who often updated others on his mining feats. For example, on September 23rd, 2010, ArtForz casually noted that he had about “2 Ghash/s” of mining power and was aiming for roughly 20% of the network’s hashrate. On December 15th, he noted that he’d reached 15.75 Ghash/s and was mining 1,292 BTC per day.

As the #bitcoin-dev channel grew, it evolved into something approximating an early social network for bitcoiners to hang out and discuss not just mining but ideas about cryptocurrency in general. It was here that Vincent Durham, going by the handle of vinced, announced Namecoin on November 14th 2010 as the first Bitcoin spin-off project.

For the most part, though, Bitcoin IRC played the vital role of node discovery in the network’s early months, so much so that IRC bootstrapping was coded into initial builds of the Bitcoin client. Without this, there was no way for anyone downloading the Bitcoin client to find out which other nodes they could connect to in order to join the network.

IRC served its purpose, but once Bitcoin gathered momentum, it was no longer essential. By version 0.6.x, the Bitcoin client no longer used IRC bootstrapping by default, and by version 0.8.2, support for IRC bootstrapping had been removed completely. But for a short time, it formed the hub around which real-time Bitcoin chat coalesced.