I. Provenance & Chain of Custody
The Artifact Drives preserve an unbroken and independently verifiable chain of custody spanning more than fifteen years. Every file, directory, timestamp, and system artifact across all drives has been conclusively linked to one owner, one user profile, and one daily user. This singular control is confirmed through forensics of login histories, profile creation dates, hardware identifiers, and time‑anchored system usage patterns.
These were the owner's personal laptops, used continuously from 2008–2015 for work, family media, email, browsing, software development, and Bitcoin experimentation. Because the machines were never transferred, loaned, or shared, the resulting digital environment forms an authentic "closed ecosystem" — an ideal forensic environment for verifying provenance and early Bitcoin activity.
Beyond operating‑system artifacts, the primary collection consists of more than 3,000 fully authenticated Satoshi‑era Bitcoin files — the rarest class of surviving digital artifacts from Bitcoin’s first years. These include complete, timestamp‑verified developer source trees, never‑released experimental builds, early GUI clients with embedded wallets, and Laszlo Hanyecz’s original 2010–2011 makefiles for Linux, Unix, macOS, and Windows — each showing identical triple‑stamped dates from January 2010 and still containing his personal email address inside the source code. Also preserved are pure BDB wallet.dat files from 2009–2012 with verifiable on‑chain histories exceeding 7,000 BTC in cumulative flows, along with pristine blkindex.dat and blk0000.dat ledger files in their unrevised, pre‑LevelDB state. All of these artifacts exist exactly as they were originally written to disk — untouched, unmodified, and impossible to fabricate — forming an irreplaceable, museum‑grade record of Bitcoin’s creation, evolution, and early developer activity.
All findings to date confirm 100% provenance integrity. Any acquisition partner — institutional or private — may validate this independently using their own forensic analysis teams. The environment they will examine has remained untouched since its original period of use, creating a museum‑grade Satoshi‑era digital time capsule.
I‑A. The Origin Story — A Window Into Bitcoin’s Dawn
To understand the magnitude of this collection, one must step back into the world that existed when Bitcoin was not a global phenomenon, but an idea shared among a handful of pioneers. These files are not merely data — they are living timestamps from the earliest days of a monetary revolution, preserved unintentionally yet perfectly, inside the ordinary digital life of a single individual who downloaded them when Bitcoin itself was still a whisper in the dark.
Imagine it: the year is 2009. A personal laptop sits on a desk — cluttered with family photos, work documents, Napster downloads, iTunes playlists, emails, memories, life. And beside them, silently accumulating, are the raw components of a new financial universe: primitive GUIs, embryonic source trees, handwritten developer notes, unreleased executables, and the original wallet.dat structures that would one day move thousands of Bitcoin when the world still hadn’t realized what a Bitcoin was worth.
These files were not curated or constructed. They were not cloned, collected, or recreated. They were lived with. They grew on the drives the same way photos of children, work presentations, and music libraries did — naturally, over time, with no intent or expectation that they would one day become priceless. This is what gives the archive its power: it is not a reconstruction. It is the environment itself, frozen exactly as it existed when Satoshi Nakamoto still walked among the mailing lists.
When a modern reader encounters this collection, their mind’s eye should be transported — not to the abstract history written in blogs or documentaries, but into the real rooms where early Bitcoin ran, compiled, crashed, updated, and evolved. These drives are a time machine. They reconnect us to the moment the global financial system began to shift — quietly, privately, on machines just like these. And now, for the first time, that entire lived environment is preserved, verifiable, and ready for the world to witness.
I. Asset Authority
III. Technical Verification
EVIDENCE_LOG_V.0.8.1Signature Generation
The original signature-generation dialog inside Bitcoin-Qt v0.8.1-beta. The embedded wallet.dat contains the private key used to produce this signature. Note the "recommended" transaction fee of 0.01 BTC—a historical artifact representing thousandths of a penny at the time, but thousands of dollars today.
Cryptographic Verification
Verification performed within the same preserved client confirms the signature as valid. This result establishes cryptographic continuity and proves that the embedded wallet is genuinely tied to the high-value transactions executed between 2012 and 2013.
Client Provenance
The "About" dialog confirms the client as "Satoshi" Bitcoin-Qt v0.8.1-beta. This build corresponds to a transitional phase in Bitcoin's development. Notably, this era of Bitcoin‑Qt featured an embedded wallet that supported only single‑key extraction and displayed the early Security UI prompting for an **“8 words or more” passphrase**, a historical artifact from the pre‑HD, pre‑descriptor era when wallet encryption was first being introduced. The drives are confirmed to have one owner, one user profile, with only one daily user throughout the life of the hardware.
Pre‑LevelDB Source Tree (2011)
The screenshot displays the complete pre‑LevelDB Bitcoin source tree, fully intact and timestamped January 29th, 2011 — two years before LevelDB officially replaced BerkeleyDB as Bitcoin’s core database engine. This preserved tree includes the full set of cryptographic, networking, wallet, and consensus logic that powered early Bitcoin.
Even more significantly, these files not only predate Google’s public announcement of LevelDB by more than six months, they also capture the exact developmental inflection point of Bitcoin’s database architecture. At this moment in history, all block storage, wallet state management, and transaction indexing still relied entirely on BerkeleyDB — the very foundation Satoshi Nakamoto built the protocol on. The preserved tree is therefore a pure snapshot of Bitcoin before any architectural divergence, before the LevelDB migration that would later introduce index rewrites, rev.dat reconstruction behavior, and a near‑catastrophic consensus fork risk in early 2013. This places the archive within the narrow developmental window where Satoshi‑era Bitcoin was still entirely based on BerkeleyDB and before the catastrophic LevelDB hard‑fork risk that nearly destabilized the chain in 2013. The presence of these untouched source files — with synchronized creation and modification timestamps — provides conclusive forensic proof of authenticity and historical position.
Unrevised Genesis‑Era blk.dat Files (Pristine Ledger Snapshot)
This screenshot displays an exceptionally rare find: a complete set of 50 pristine blk.dat files, including blkindex.dat and blk00000.dat — the original Genesis‑era blockchain segment written directly by the Bitcoin client before LevelDB, before rev.dat, before pruning, before any modern ledger revisions. These files represent the blockchain exactly as Satoshi’s software produced it.
Unlike modern installations, which rewrite history through rev.dat files, XOR compaction, and LevelDB migrations, these blk.dat files are untouched. Their timestamps reflect the actual moment they were written to disk on their original hardware in 2012–2013. No reconstruction, no redownload, no reindex — this is the blockchain as it truly existed during Bitcoin’s formative years.
Forensic analysts prize these datasets because they preserve: early block serialization, pre‑fork consensus behavior, original BerkeleyDB indexing formats, and the exact byte‑level structure of blocks before LevelDB replaced BDB in 2013. A complete, unrevised set like this is almost never found outside of institutional archives.
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2011 Passphrase Dialog — “8 Words or More” Encryption Requirement
This screenshot captures the original Bitcoin-Qt wallet encryption dialog from January 29th, 2011, preserved directly from the source tree. In this interface, the earliest wallet-encryption system presents its now‑legendary instruction: users must enter “10 or more random characters, or eight or more words.” This guidance predates BIP‑39 by more than two years, emerging long before any mnemonic standard, wordlist, checksum system, or HD wallet structure existed.
What makes this historically profound is that Bitcoin's developers had not yet conceived of seed phrases as we understand them today. There was no standard, no dictionary, no entropy model — merely an early recognition that human‑memorable passphrases composed of multiple words inherently produce stronger entropy. This UI therefore stands as one of the first documented instances of a Bitcoin client encouraging multi‑word passphrases, years before the modern wallet ecosystem adopted mnemonic seeds.
The dialog appears only in a narrow developmental window after wallet encryption was introduced (late 2010/early 2011) but before the HD‑wallet revolution of 2013–2014. Its survival in fully functional form — not reconstructed or copied, but preserved on the original drives where it first existed — provides powerful forensic assurance. The synchronized timestamps across the entire source tree, the absence of reconstruction artifacts, and the presence of accompanying Satoshi‑era binaries confirm beyond dispute that this is an authentic, untouched development environment.
In modern historical analysis, this interface represents a missing link between Satoshi‑era Bitcoin and the future of wallet design. It captures Bitcoin’s moment of transition — when encryption was new, when no mnemonic standard existed, and when security still relied entirely on user creativity and entropy awareness. Its inclusion in the Artifact Drives elevates the collection further: it is a living snapshot of Bitcoin’s pre‑mnemonic philosophy, preserved exactly as it appeared in 2011.
This screenshot captures the original Bitcoin-Qt wallet encryption dialog from January 29th, 2011, preserved directly from the source tree. Here, Bitcoin’s early wallet encryption system displays its historically significant instruction: the user must enter “10 or more random characters, or eight or more words.” This predates the BIP‑39 mnemonic standard by years and represents one of the earliest public implementations of a word‑based entropy recommendation in Bitcoin’s UI.
This instruction appears only in a narrow window of Bitcoin’s evolution — after wallet encryption was introduced but before HD wallets, descriptors, or structured mnemonic systems existed. Few surviving environments still contain this dialog in its original operational form. Its presence in the Artifact Drives provides further cryptographic and forensic confirmation of the untouched, unaltered state of the 2011 development environment.
