How to Find Older Bitcoin Versions Safely?

The latest files here only go back to version 0.9.5. Check it out here: bitcoin.org/bin/ There's also 0.8.6 in a folder labeled (insecure), but honestly, I have no clue why it's there. Older versions are tough to track down. Sure, these have signed files, which is a plus.

There are docker images available with most historical Bitcoin Core versions dating back to v0.2.0 from 2009. Look into that if you need older stuff.

Yeah, that’s likely because of CVE-2015-6031. You can find more info on it here: bitcoincore.org/en/2024/07/03/disclose_upnp_rce/. They also have version 0.8.6 there, but you’ll need to be comfortable with Docker to use it, since it’s all CLI/RPC.

Someone shared a link to old versions. If Docker isn’t your thing (same here), just ask for the source.

I have no idea what Docker is. So, no one has older versions with checksums saved?

Or you could use dockerc to convert those Docker images into a standalone binary.

This isn’t my recommendation, and I’m not vouching for it, but I found a Russian site that has those older versions. No hashes for file integrity, though, so be careful.

You can still find these old versions on GitHub too, just check under the tags section: github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/tags?after=v0.8.5 Might need to do some extra work to get them running.

Not sure about those links. I’d stick with the safer ones. I’m testing the binaries from that insecure folder for version 0.8.6 in a controlled environment. Seems like all these old versions were signed by Gavin Andresen only. I found his key on Ubuntu and MIT’s repo, which gives a good signature for the sha256 file.

Yeah, that’s what happens with pruned nodes. They can’t scan the blocks that are already gone. Best way to set up a node for old wallet.dat files is to disable prune. Or load all wallet.dat files before resyncing, so they’re scanned while syncing.