Satoshi Nakamoto released Version 0.1 of the application underlying Bitcoin on January 3, 2008. It wasn’t really software at that point in time; it didn’t have a user interface or even a DOS-like command line. To run it, you had to use Visual Studio on a Windows machine. Nevertheless, the functionality was “remarkably complete,” and the first online transaction took place six days later. To make his project open-source, Nakamoto put it on SourceForge and asked other developers to suggest contributions to the core technology. Until mid-2010, Nakamoto controlled which of these suggestions would make it into the official version of the Bitcoin software. Then that responsibility passed to Gavin Andresen.
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