My Bitcoin V 0.1 says, "not connected" when I try to generate coins. I have ensured the port is connected through the firewall. Also, I have read that V 0.1.3 corrected this problem. However, I am trying to connect without installing V 0.1.3.

Does anyone know how to correct a V 0.1 "not connected"?


You cannot.

There have been both changes to the P2P protocol that prevent this, and changes to the way that nodes are discovered.

The method which 0.1.0 discovered new nodes was by joining the #bitcoin channel on freenode. Your IP address would be encoded in a certain way and that would be the IRC nick for your node. However this has long since been removed from the Bitcoin software and any node that does connect to the #bitcoin channel will be kicked from it (the encoding is unique and identifiable).

Since 0.1.0 can't connect to the IRC channel to discover new nodes, it is unable to learn about nodes that it can connect to.

Furthermore, the P2P protocol has changed since 0.1.0 was released and thus 0.1.0 is unable to communicate with modern nodes. This change was to add a checksum to the end of the P2P message header. Messages without this checksum will be rejected by modern nodes.

Lastly, 0.1.0 is too old so modern nodes won't connect to it. They have a minimum supported protocol version number, and 0.1.0's protocol version number is far too low. So even if you could get it to connect, the connection would be dropped.

The way to deal with the node discovery issue is to manually modify the peers.dat file to have the IP address and port of nodes that you want to connect to.

The only way to deal with the P2P protocol changes (checksum and version number) is to have a shim that sits in between all of your connections and modifies the P2P messages to work with modern node software. Or you can connect to a modified node which can deal with 0.1.0 traffic.

Even if you are able to connect to the Bitcoin network with 0.1.0, you won't be able to mine anything as the CPU mining is no longer viable, and the CPU miner implementation in 0.1.0 is not efficient. You also wouldn't be able to even sync as it syncs too slowly. Blocks will be found faster than it is able to process them. It will run into additional issues when it receives a new block before it is able to sync the blockchain that precedes that block.

  • Okay. What version and date implemented these changes? Also, Does the modified version contain all block and transaction data from day one of bitcoin because when I installed the latest version, it started around, I believe, 2012 (Wheres all the previous data (2009-2011), what happened to it (Wallets, Transactions, Keys, etc), what became of it?) – ImLostPleaseHelpThx Jun 29 '20 at 22:53
  • ...also, how do you create this shim? – ImLostPleaseHelpThx Jun 29 '20 at 22:53
  • 0.2.9 introduced the checksum in May 2010. 0.3.18 is the oldest version allowed by modern nodes. All versions will attempt to download the blockchain from genesis. The software does not come with the data from day one, it all gets downloaded from other nodes on the network. If it did not begin from the genesis block, then you already had some of the blockchain already downloaded. The shim needs to be a program that you write yourself. – Andrew Chow Jun 30 '20 at 1:06
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    Older versions are no longer available because they are insecure and no longer able to sync the blockchain. 0.1.0 is only available because some people have decided that it has historical significance and re-uploaded copies that they had downloaded when it was available. Why are you trying to use such old versions of Bitcoin? – Andrew Chow Jun 30 '20 at 2:06
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    Older Bitcoin software provide far less access to the inner workings of Bitcoin. There are few/no RPCs (depending on how old you go) and there are newer RPCs that provide better access to internal structures so that you can inspect and learn from them. Older does not necessarily mean better for learning. Older software is also not necessary to access old files. Bitcoin largely maintains backwards compatibility with the data files produced by old software so you should be able to open wallets and some existing blockchain data in a new software. – Andrew Chow Jun 30 '20 at 15:56

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