“ridiculously easy for testing” — the comment beside MINPROOFOFWORK = 20, the November difficulty floor this chain still runs on.
— Satoshi Nakamoto — main.h, 15 November 2008 pre-release
Look at the genesis hash: it leads with five zeros, not eight. That is not cosmetic. November counts proof-of-work in leading zero bits, so the hash is shaped by a different rule than every chain descended from January.
| denomination | COIN = 1,000,000 — and no “satoshi”; that unit is a January property | main.h:34 |
|---|---|---|
| subsidy | 100 coins (10000 * CENT) | main.cpp:654 |
| halving | every 100,000 blocks — an explicit loop | main.cpp:655 |
| block spacing | 900 s — 15 minutes | main.cpp:663 |
| proof-of-work | nBits = leading zero bits, target = ~0 >> nBits | main.h:38,875 |
| retarget | ±1-bit nudge, at most one change per 30-day window | main.cpp:660-705 |
| coinbase value | must equal subsidy + fees — != rejects | main.cpp:739 |
| fee | fixed 1 * CENT | main.cpp |
Frozen in rules_nov08.json, every value carrying its source line and a provenance class — read from the surviving pre-release source, with January used only as the differential baseline.
November never had a Script file, so it disabled nothing. NOV08-X’s script engine is reconstructed from the interface main.cpp actually references (CScript, OP_CHECKSIG) and carries the complete original vocabulary — OP_CAT, OP_MUL, OP_LSHIFT, OP_INVERT. This is the most interpretive part of the chain and is marked as such: a reconstruction from a referenced interface is a weaker claim than a rule read off a line of source, and the two are not presented as equals.
A mainnet-framed message is refused. Isolation is enforced by the wire format, not by policy — NOV08-X cannot reach Bitcoin, JAN09-X, or any historical chain.
# join it
docker run --rm -v xnode-data:/data ghcr.io/original-bitcoin-laboratory/xnode \
--chain nov08x --datadir /data --connect seed.bitcoin-lab.org:18008
# or from source
python -m netnode --chain nov08x --datadir ./data-nov08 --connect seed.bitcoin-lab.org:18008
Images published from 15 Aug 2026 are signed — how to check with cosign. Earlier tags are not; that gap is stated, not back-dated.
Your node mints the genesis itself and re-validates every block — live status · explorer · the invitation
What “MODEL” means, and why it is stated first. NOV08-X executes November’s constitution on the laboratory’s own engines — no period toolchain, no 2008 binary, because no released November binary exists to run. That is a weaker class of evidence than Bitcoin or the two-node witness, both of which execute Satoshi’s actual January 2009 client. The laboratory keeps those apart deliberately.
Every rule carries a source anchor, and the interpretive parts are fenced off. The monetary, proof-of-work, retarget and coinbase rules are read verbatim from the surviving pre-release source. The script engine is not — it is reconstructed from an interface, and is labelled as reconstruction wherever it appears. NOV08-Full, the interpretive completion, remains walled off as speculation and is not run here.
It is not recovered history and not “true Bitcoin.” A new experimental descendant, treated as neutrally as any other chain on this site — a Bitcoin, not the Bitcoin. Its sibling JAN09-X answers the same counterfactual from the January end.
NOT money. No premine, no sale, no market, no value assigned, no promises.