I’m trying to understand the origin of bitcoin and where some of Satoshi’s ideas came from. I was curious if anyone knew of any earlier p2p software that used IRC to bootstrap? The earliest mention I could find of p2p bootstrapping using IRC was in a paper written in 2007 called “Decentralized Bootstrapping in Pervasive Applications.” [1] Has the idea been around longer than that, or is it more likely Satoshi got his ideas from these guys?
Someone had suggested to me that they believed bittorrent used that mechanism before, but i was unable to find any corroboration for that claim.

[1] M.Knoll, A.Wacker, G.Schiele, and T.Weis - "Decentralized Bootstrapping in Pervasive Applications" http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.869.9975&rep=rep1&type=pdf