Claude AI Cracks Satoshi’s 17-Year Bitcoin Mystery

Developer T4T5 used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 to reconstruct Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2009 Bitcoin development environment, producing a rebuilt bitcoin.exe that matched the original file’s SHA-256 hash and every byte. Bitcoin’s early software was not designed to be reproducible; T4T5 used software packages from 2006 to 2008. The project indicated Nakamoto used Windows XP with MinGW GCC 3.4.5, compiled most of Bitcoin in debug mode, and maximized optimization for mining-related hashing code. It indicated the preserved software matched Nakamoto’s published source with no hidden code, while the known Bitcoin 0.1.0 executable was version 0.1.1, compiled January 10, 2009, at 23:16 UTC, two days after Bitcoin’s public announcement; no verified copy of the January 8 launch-day executable is known to survive.