I know the history and what it is. I understand that the bitcoin network is essentually a bunch of self synchornizing ledgers. Anytime someone starts up a bitcoin wallet, it downloads the blockchain from the network, and then becomes another node in that network. My question is, who started the first node of the network, and how?
Satoshi was the first node on the network. The first block, block 0, was mined by satoshi. This block, known as the genesis block, is hard coded into the software and cannot ever change.
Satoshi created the Bitcoin network. Originally your node would connect to an IRC channel and receive IP addresses to connect to. This behavior was also hard coded into the client. Nowadays we use DNS seeders, servers that respond to a DNS request with IP addresses of nodes that you can connect to. We also use hard coded seed nodes. The DNS seeders and seed nodes are all hard coded into the software and automatically used to find the IP addresses of nodes in order to connect to the network.
Thank you for this. This explains a lot. In terms of how this was implemented, did he just basically load up a bitcoin client, and a miner program, and then the first block mined automatically became the genesis block?