Where to find old versions of bitcoin-qt from 2011-2012 for download? I cannot find anything on the source code repository and all links I've found on forums are dead.
Is anyone able to assist finding the very old windows bitcoin-qt downloads?
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2Preemptively, you don't need an old version of the software to open an old wallet; it would be unwise to use any of the extremely old Bitcoin versions.– ClarisCommented Feb 11, 2021 at 1:57
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I want to analyse see how the random seed was generated in old versions, mainly the UI part, I don't plan on opening any wallets or doing any transactions.– rollschCommented Feb 11, 2021 at 3:18
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@rolls Perhaps it is more interesting to ask directly how keys were generated in old versions of Bitcoin-Qt? A good answer would include references to source code to support its claims.– Pieter WuilleCommented Feb 12, 2021 at 4:15
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I want the actual release so I can see the UI for generating and saving the random seed. So I can assist with the off chance it is recoverable. I can't find any examples of what the random seed data (from moving your mouse) looked like.– rollschCommented Feb 12, 2021 at 4:51
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1Before Bitcoin Core 0.13 there was no concept of a "random seed", as wallets weren't deterministic. Keys were just generated randomly, each individually, and added to a keypool. In old versions, OpenSSL's random number generator was used. You need to look at the source code for this, I don't think you can easily derive this from looking at the binary.– Pieter WuilleCommented Jun 2, 2021 at 17:33
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3 Answers
You can find the first release of bitcoin on this old bitcointalk thread offered by Hal Finney himself https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=68121.0
For the more recent version, circa 2009 you can dig the official github repo releases https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/releases
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These must be compiled, compiling qt on windows is not trivial even for a developer unfamiliar with it.– rollschCommented Feb 11, 2021 at 3:19
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1@rolls: Do you need to compile? Can't source inspection be used to "see how the random seed was generated "? Commented Feb 11, 2021 at 10:40
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The source code is happily all in the same source tree for every version since 0.1. None of the versions you're talking about used HD seeds though, they used raw private keys.– ClarisCommented Feb 11, 2021 at 13:20
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1@rollsch Moving the mouse feeds entropy to the internal random number generator (which in very early Bitcoin versions used OpenSSL's code, which on itself gathers entropy from multiple sources, including hardware, OS, ...). Then that random number generator was used to generate private keys directly. There was no explicit "seed" involved. Commented Oct 8 at 18:28
You can find source code (and sometimes pre-built executables for some platforms) for obsolete versions of Bitcoin core (previously just known as bitcoin-qt or bitcoin) at these locations:
| From version | To version | Repository |
|---|---|---|
| - | 0.1.0 | zorinaq.com currently has source for v0.1.0 |
| 0.1.x | 0.10.x | the Internet Archive, also known as The Wayback Machine, has source code for many versions (e.g. 0.8.4) that used to be stored at Sourceforge but which are no longer available there. |
| 0.10.0 | current | GitHub has source code for releases from at least v0.10.0 to the current version (28.0 at time of writing) |
As people have commented: if you want to open an ancient wallet file, you don't need an old version of Bitcoin, the current version should be able to open old wallets.
To compile older versions on modern operating systems requires extra work. This is at least partly due to changes in shared libraries etc. See AChow's notes on Building Old Bitcoin Core Releases
answered Oct 8 at 14:29
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Biggest question was to see how the entropy for the key was generated. The wallet is long gone afaik now. However I have the hard drive that it was on., I can recover some files but not the wallet.dat. If I could figure or how the entropy was generated maybe there are some temp files still available. I have they password the file was encrypted with and the address, then finally a hard drive that was likely formatted or had appdata cleared.– rollschCommented Nov 8 at 22:08
I have a copy of the Windows 32-bit version 0.4.0 of the Bitcoin client (from 2011), install .exe file. If you want a copy, let me know.
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Thanks but I would need to ensure I trust the source of the file.– rollschCommented Nov 8 at 22:11