Six features in one release. Each one mattered.
The JSON-RPC daemon and headless mode made Bitcoin programmable. Before v0.3 it was a desktop app. After, it was a server you could control by code. Every early exchange and payment processor ran on it. Mt. Gox ran on it. BitInstant ran on it. When Bitcoin became infrastructure, this is how.
20% faster hashing and a hashmeter: real-time hashrate display in the client. GPU mining was just emerging in July 2010. Miners had no feedback on how fast their hardware ran. The hashmeter gave them that number.
Transaction filter tabs let you view received and sent separately instead of one long list. People were accumulating enough history that they needed to organize it. The toy was becoming a tool.
German, Dutch, and Italian translations, contributed by community members. Before Slashdot. These people found Bitcoin independently, in continental Europe, and cared enough to translate the whole application.
The Mac build came from Laszlo Hanyecz, who paid 10,000 BTC for pizza six weeks earlier. Bitcoin now ran on Windows, Linux, and Mac. First feature shipped by someone other than Satoshi. Bitcoin's first community-built release.
Martti Malmi and forum regulars organized a submission to Slashdot. On July 11 it hit the front page. Downloads jumped from 3,000 to 20,000+ in a month. Price surged tenfold in five days. Jed McCaleb registered Mt. Gox eleven days after the v0.3 release.
The JSON-RPC daemon outlasted Satoshi, McCaleb, and Mt. Gox itself. A version runs in every Bitcoin node today.
Original: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=238.0
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