A Look Back at the First Bitcoin Website, Launched 16 Years Ago

In a recent tweet, Bitcoin historian Pete Rizzo shared a glimpse into what the first Bitcoin website looked like on Jan. 31, 2009

Bitcoin historian Pete Rizzo recently shared a glimpse into what the first Bitcoin website looked like on Jan. 31, 2009, exactly 16 years ago.

"What the 1st Bitcoin website looked like when the price was $0, exactly 16 years ago," Rizzo tweeted, accompanied by a screenshot of the Bitcoin.org website as of Jan. 31, 2009. At the time, Bitcoin was valued at $0.

A brief look at the screenshot reveals the simplistic nature of the earliest version of the Bitcoin website, which also featured at the time the details of the first open-source Bitcoin client known as Bitcoin v0.1, released on Jan. 9, 2009.

The domain name bitcoin.org was registered on Aug. 18, 2008. Later that year, on Oct. 31, a link to a paper authored by Satoshi Nakamoto titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" was posted to a cryptography mailing list.

On Jan. 3, 2009, Bitcoin came into being with Satoshi Nakamoto mining the genesis block of Bitcoin (block 0), which had a reward of 50 Bitcoins. Satoshi's involvement with Bitcoin does not appear to go beyond mid-2010. In April 2011, Satoshi sent a message to a Bitcoin contributor, saying that he had "moved on to other things."

Advancement of Bitcoin.org website

Bitcoin.org was originally registered and owned by Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin developer Martti Malmi.

From 2011 to 2013, the website was largely used to release new versions of the software currently known as Bitcoin Core. The site was rebuilt in 2013, with multiple new pages, additional Bitcoin software listings and the creation of the translation system.

When Satoshi Nakamoto left the scene in 2011, he transferred ownership of the domain to people other than Bitcoin developers to distribute responsibilities and prevent any one person or organization from simply seizing control of the Bitcoin project.

Today, Bitcoin.org is an independent open-source project with contributions from all over the world.