Seventeen years ago today, on January 17, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin v0.1 Alpha, marking a pivotal moment in cryptocurrency history. This initial version allowed users to run their own nodes from any computer, laying the groundwork for the decentralized network that Bitcoin is today. The source code included an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client for message bootstrapping and a framework for a virtual poker game, which was later removed in version 0.8.2.