Before Bitcoin moved to GitHub, all development took place in a Subversion (SVN) repository hosted on SourceForge. The repository was created on August 30, 2009, and reached its final commit — revision r252 — on September 13, 2011. Only four people ever committed code to this repository.
Prior to SVN
Satoshi Nakamoto distributed Bitcoin’s source code as .rar archives on SourceForge before the SVN repository existed. The SourceForge project was registered on November 9, 2008, and Bitcoin v0.1 was released on January 8, 2009. For the first eight months, source code was distributed as downloadable archives rather than through version control.
SVN Committers (complete list)
| Username | Developer | First Commit | Last Commit | Commits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| sirius-m | Martti Malmi | r1 (2009-08-30) | r56 | 21 |
| s_nakamoto | Satoshi Nakamoto | r15 | r202 (2010-12-15) | 164 |
| laszloh | Laszlo Hanyecz | r123 (2010-08-04) | r123 | 1 |
| gavinandresen | Gavin Andresen | r165 (2010-10-11) | r252 (2011-09-13) | 66 |
Martti Malmi (sirius-m) created the SVN repository with the “First commit” at r1 on August 30, 2009. He started the Linux port of a codebase Satoshi had developed on Windows, committing Linux alternatives for the Windows headers on October 31, 2009; Satoshi finished the build and merged it into the trunk on November 5. Malmi contributed 21 revisions before stepping back from active development.
Satoshi Nakamoto (s_nakamoto) committed 164 of the 252 revisions — by far the most of any contributor. A git mirror of the repository shows only 159 of them; the SVN commit-statistics entry identifies the five it is missing (r29, r30, r31, r50, r98) against SourceForge’s own log. That same entry has the full word-count, interval, and diff-size statistics run across all 164 messages. His last release commit was r201 (“version 0.3.19 release”) on December 13, 2010 — documented in its own entry. Two days later, he made one final small fix — r202 (“get external ip from irc”) on December 15, 2010. No s_nakamoto commits appear after r202.
Laszlo Hanyecz (laszloh) — known for the first real-world Bitcoin purchase (10,000 BTC for two pizzas) and for pioneering GPU mining — made exactly one SVN commit: r123 on August 4, 2010, fixing macOS compilation issues.
Gavin Andresen (gavinandresen) received commit access in October 2010, as part of Satoshi’s gradual handover of the project; his first commit under his own name is r165 on October 11, 2010. With 66 commits, he was the second most active committer after Satoshi. When Malmi proposed giving the bitcoin.org server’s root password to Satoshi and one more person, Satoshi wrote back naming that person:
Satoshi Nakamoto (email to Martti Malmi, December 03, 2010, 7:58:40 PM UTC)It should be Gavin. I trust him, he’s responsible, professional, and technically much more linux capable than me.
Andresen’s final SVN commit, r252 on September 13, 2011, contained the message: “Development has moved to github.” This marked the official end of the SourceForge SVN era.
Notable absences: Jeff Garzik and Pieter Wuille are listed as SourceForge project members but never made any SVN commits. Their commit access began on GitHub.
For how this committer record bears on Satoshi’s Windows toolchain, including the Linux build Malmi started and Satoshi finished, see the analysis of Satoshi’s Windows development environment; the code analysis covers the source itself.
