I don't know whether there is historical data, although there might be a list of IP addresses in early versions of the bitcoin core software that were tried first to find working peers.
(Maybe not, I vaguely remember some IRC channel being used to find peer IP addresses, I didn't look at the technical aspects too closely)
Some data starting in 2011 can be found in the list of IP addresses that were connected to clockchain.info at least once.
The most recent data is at https://blockchain.info/en/ip-log/0, you can take the number of unique IP addresses, divide it by 50 (that's 69421 right now, might be 69422 by the time you try this), and use it instead of the "0" in the URL to see the earliest IP addresses that did not have a connection anytime later, i.e. this list show only the most recent connection time for each IP address. If 127.0.0.1 connected to blockchain.info first in 2011 and then at some later time, you won't see an entry for it in 2011.
The list is of course not representative of the nodes that existed in 2009, you see that in 2011 there were nodes from all over the world, so chances are really slim that your sleuthing work would lead to the earliest users of bitcoin.
I suspect that the first publicly accessible nodes were set up anonymously on some hosting service. It is highly unlikely that Satoshi ran a node on his home IP address and published that IP as some kind of "seed" node address when he was otherwise pretty careful to hide personally identifying information.
Onkel Paul
(Maybe not, I vaguely remember some IRC channel being used to find peer IP addresses, I didn't look at the technical aspects too closely)
Some data starting in 2011 can be found in the list of IP addresses that were connected to clockchain.info at least once.
The most recent data is at https://blockchain.info/en/ip-log/0, you can take the number of unique IP addresses, divide it by 50 (that's 69421 right now, might be 69422 by the time you try this), and use it instead of the "0" in the URL to see the earliest IP addresses that did not have a connection anytime later, i.e. this list show only the most recent connection time for each IP address. If 127.0.0.1 connected to blockchain.info first in 2011 and then at some later time, you won't see an entry for it in 2011.
The list is of course not representative of the nodes that existed in 2009, you see that in 2011 there were nodes from all over the world, so chances are really slim that your sleuthing work would lead to the earliest users of bitcoin.
I suspect that the first publicly accessible nodes were set up anonymously on some hosting service. It is highly unlikely that Satoshi ran a node on his home IP address and published that IP as some kind of "seed" node address when he was otherwise pretty careful to hide personally identifying information.
Onkel Paul
Thanks for the reply. I know that Satoshi wouldn't run a node with his own IP address but rather use a hosting service for it. Never knew the ip logs from blockchain.info until now. I'm gonna see what I can dig from what you pointed me to do. Thanks!
