These days there are DNS seeds and hardcoded IP addresses, however again within the day when Satoshi launched Bitcoin v0.1, how did new nodes hook up with the remainder of the community? My preliminary thought was that the primary launch would have Satoshi’s IP handle hardcoded, however I could not discover something of the kind within the supply code.

Quoting from the wiki:

Along with studying and sharing its personal handle, the node realized about different node addresses by way of an IRC channel. See irc.cpp.

After studying its personal handle, a node encoded its personal handle right into a string for use as a nickname. Then, it randomly joined an IRC channel named between #bitcoin00 and #bitcoin99. Then it issued a WHO command. The thread learn the strains as they appeared within the channel and decoded the IP addresses of different nodes within the channel. It did this in a loop, ceaselessly, till the node was shutdown.

When the shopper found an handle from IRC, it set the timestamp on the handle to the present time, however it used a “penalty” of 51 minutes, which suggests it regarded prefer it was really seen nearly an hour earlier.