I've spent a lot of time reviewing the original Bitcoin codebase.
It's brilliant code. It's production-grade C++. There's nothing in it that hints at academic origins. Most people are either academics or professional coders -- to be both is a rare exception.
The codebase seemed to materialize out of nowhere. One of the earliest commits in the SVN repo contains 36 thousand lines of code. "Satoshi" (or this group of people) must have worked months or a year on this before putting it up on source control.
The code also uses irc to find seed nodes, which is amusing. It just connects to #bitcoin and assumes that some of the people in the channel are running bitcoin nodes. That's a cool way around the "What if all the hardcoded seed nodes fail?" problem. I know it's probably a standard tactic, but bitcoin integrates so many standard tactics so well in addition to its academic work.
It's brilliant code. It's production-grade C++. There's nothing in it that hints at academic origins. Most people are either academics or professional coders -- to be both is a rare exception.
The codebase seemed to materialize out of nowhere. One of the earliest commits in the SVN repo contains 36 thousand lines of code. "Satoshi" (or this group of people) must have worked months or a year on this before putting it up on source control.
The code also uses irc to find seed nodes, which is amusing. It just connects to #bitcoin and assumes that some of the people in the channel are running bitcoin nodes. That's a cool way around the "What if all the hardcoded seed nodes fail?" problem. I know it's probably a standard tactic, but bitcoin integrates so many standard tactics so well in addition to its academic work.
Here it is as one gigantic file: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/b4d5d1ab333c5d6e238fdc2242...