@daily_btc_lore | Daily Bitcoin History Threads

July 6, 2010 | 16 years ago today

Bitcoin v0.3 ReleasedBitcoin v0.3 Released

On July 6, 2010, Satoshi Nakamoto posted Bitcoin v0.3 to the forum with six distinct upgrades in one release. Each one mattered. Five days later the price surged tenfold and Mt. Gox opened.

The JSON-RPC DaemonThe JSON-RPC Daemon

The most consequential feature wasn't listed first. Buried in the release notes was a JSON-RPC interface and headless daemon mode. Before v0.3, Bitcoin was a desktop application you opened and closed. After v0.3, it could run as a persistent server controlled by code over a network port. A developer could write a dozen lines and have a working payment system. Satoshi had built an API before anyone called it that.

Every early exchange ran on that daemon. Every payment processor. Every automated service in Bitcoin's first years. Mt. Gox ran on it. BitInstant ran on it. The entire infrastructure layer of the early Bitcoin economy was built on the interface Satoshi shipped that July afternoon.

Hashing Speed and the HashmeterHashing Speed and the Hashmeter

v0.3 shipped 20% faster hashing and a hashmeter: a real-time display of your hashrate in the client. This sounds minor. In July 2010, GPU mining was just emerging, and miners had no direct feedback on how fast their hardware was running. The hashmeter gave them that number. For anyone mining seriously, watching your rate in real time changed how you operated.

Transaction Filter TabsTransaction Filter Tabs

The wallet gained transaction filter tabs, letting users view received and sent transactions separately rather than in one undifferentiated list. People were accumulating enough transaction history that they needed to organize it. The UI matured because the use was maturing. The toy was becoming a tool.

The First TranslationsThe First Translations

v0.3 shipped with German, Dutch, and Italian translations contributed by community members. This was before Slashdot. These were not people who discovered Bitcoin in the wave that followed. They found it independently, in continental Europe, and cared enough to translate the entire application. Bitcoin was already global before anyone outside the forum had heard of it.

The Mac BuildThe Mac Build

The Mac OS X port was contributed by Laszlo Hanyecz, the same person who had paid 10,000 BTC for two pizzas six weeks earlier. Bitcoin now ran on Windows, Linux, and Mac. For the first time, a shipped feature was written by someone other than Satoshi. v0.3 was Bitcoin's first community-built release.

The Slashdot CampaignThe Slashdot Campaign

Martti Malmi and other forum regulars saw v0.3 as the hook they had been waiting for. They organized a deliberate campaign to submit the release to Slashdot, then one of the most powerful technology news amplifiers on the internet. On July 11, it hit the front page.

What FollowedWhat Followed

The effect was immediate. Downloads jumped from roughly 3,000 in June to over 20,000 in July. Bitcoin's price went from $0.008 to $0.08 in five days, its first tenfold surge. Eleven days after the v0.3 release, Jed McCaleb registered Mt. Gox as a Bitcoin exchange.

The JSON-RPC daemon outlasted Satoshi, McCaleb, and Mt. Gox itself. A version of the same interface still runs in every Bitcoin node today. Six features. One release. Bitcoin went from experiment to platform.

Part of an ongoing series on Bitcoin history. This event falls on July 6, 2010.