@BitcoinMagazine What they were supposed to do, they didn't do, which is remove the coin minting limit and increase it. This coin minting limit for all cryptocurrencies is utter nonsense.
The day Bitcoin almost died
this bug remains one of the strangest events ever recorded on the blockchain
August 2010:
- a single transaction breaks Bitcoin
- creates 184,467,440,737 BTC
- over 8 million times the 21M supply
- all from an input of just 0.5 BTC
block 74638
the exploit:
tx id
1d5e512a9723cbef373b970eb52f1e9598ad67e7408077a82fdac194b65333c9
two outputs:
- 92,233,720,368.54277039 BTC
- 92,233,720,368.54277039 BTC
the bug was an integer overflow
- the sum wrapped into a negative number
- the code accepted it as valid
- the transaction looked like it paid a fee
for a few hours, this was real
- the bad chain kept mining
- 53 blocks were added
- around 2,650 BTC in block rewards
all on a corrupted chain
then the reaction
- Jeff Garzik notices something is wrong
- an emergency thread opens on Bitcointalk
- Gavin Andresen writes a fix
- Satoshi reviews it and approves it
- new code is released in under 6 hours
version 0.3.10
- nodes upgrade
- the chain reorganizes
- the “bad chain” is removed
the overflow coins are never spent
the addresses remain empty
And fun fact, the original 0.5 BTC is still untouched today
one day later, it’s gone
the blockchain remembers everything even the day it almost broke itself
@StarPlatinum_ It should have been left like that; now there would be more Bitcoin for everyone. They should have removed that limitation; there should have been a second mining renewal, and when that one ended, another 21 would be mined, and so on.
@Bitcoin the brokers and to stop selling the coins to these billionaire trash, I hold the bitcoins that should be for the crypto community and also Satoshi was wrong to put a limit on bitcoin mining and it should be for 100 million units of BTC or 900 million
@Cointelegraph the brokers and to stop selling the coins to these billionaire trash, I hold the bitcoins that should be for the crypto community and also Satoshi was wrong to put a limit on bitcoin mining and it should be for 100 million units of BTC or 900 million