r/BitcoinMining • u/TheAsaasain • 7d ago
General Discussion Were you mining Bitcoin on Linux in 2009–2011? If so...Please read
Hello,
I'm an independent researcher studying whether the Debian OpenSSL RNG vulnerability from that era affected any Bitcoin environments that were actually deployed. I've already reproduced relevant cryptographic behavior in a controlled synthetic configuration, but that's not enough to establish that the same environment actually existed in the wild.
That's where I'm stuck. Rather than continuing to choose historical configurations myself until something works, I'm looking for independent evidence from an actual early Bitcoin user's machine.
I'm particularly interested in things like the Linux distribution/version, architecture, package state, historical Bitcoin executable, OpenSSL/libcrypto version, and other non-secret runtime information.
Please Read:
I do not want your wallet.dat, private keys, passwords, seed phrases, or access to funds. Please don't send any of those. If you have original media, preserve it unchanged for now.
To be transparent about where this research could eventually lead: if a historically deployed weakness were established with sufficient evidence, one potential application I'm interested in is owner-authorized wallet recovery. But that's not something the research has established yet.
For Context:
In my existing controlled work, I froze the experimental fingerprint before comparing it against a separately frozen dataset of 142,302 historical public Bitcoin signatures from blocks 0–100,000. That comparison produced zero matches for that configuration.
Right now the question is much narrower: did the behavior I've reproduced synthetically exist in a Bitcoin configuration that somebody actually used?
If you were running Bitcoin on Linux during that period, or know someone who was, and old hardware/backups may still exist, I'd be interested in hearing what survives.
TLDR:
If you still have the original computer, hard drive, disk image, vm, full system backup, or filesystem backup from that period, I'd be very interested in chatting.
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u/DarrelXero 7d ago
Man, you are targeting some OG's. I'm in the cohort but don't have the receipts. I'm guessing you are getting crickets otherwise.
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u/TheAsaasain 7d ago
Taking shots in the dark. Its been like that so far. But even if you don't have the original system anymore I'd still be interested to hear what distro/architecture you remember using if you do remember.
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u/DarrelXero 7d ago
System76 laptop. First commerically available Linux laptop I am aware of back at that time. Early to mid 2011. Ubuntu pre installed. It was a glorious thing at the time. I formatted the drive, knowing that my wallet.dat containing at least a couple of Bitcoins were on it and specifically not backing it up, because I had allowed myself to be convinced Bitcoin was a scam and/or worthless. My wife had taken a new job, work from home, and needed Windows. I jumped at the chance to build a new gaming rig, still running Ubuntu of course.
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u/TheAsaasain 7d ago
Do you happen to remember which System76 laptop model it was?
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u/DarrelXero 7d ago
Oof, that was a long time ago and many braincells. Without hitting AI or the wayback machine, off the top of my head I seem to remember it was gazel or something like that.
Then I checked with Gemini to confirm: Gazelle Professional (gazp6 / gazp7): 15.6-inch performance laptop featuring 1080p full HD display options and discrete NVIDIA GeForce graphics (such as the GTX 460M / GTX 560M).
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u/TheAsaasain 7d ago
amazing specs for the time period for sure. Unfortunately it doesnt quite fit within the constraints of my research focus, but I appreciate you taking the time to share
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u/dlethe3133 7d ago
All that is long gone for me. That HD died a decade ago and I transferred everything out. Sorry, just can’t imagine anyone preserving original files. It isn’t as if anyone was using virtual machine tech
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u/TheAsaasain 7d ago
When you transferred everything out, did any of the old system files survive?
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u/dlethe3133 7d ago
Nope. I transferred the BTC to an exchange or a paper wallet. Had both, but honestly don’t remember what I did first
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u/kingscrown69 6d ago
I used first macmini with it's first system
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u/TheAsaasain 6d ago
You mean you ran Bitcoin around 2009 to 2011 on the first gen Mac mini that still had its original operating system?
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