Bitcoin stopped working TWICE in its history
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Bitcoiners,
Did you know Bitcoin stopped working TWICE in its history?
1st in 2010
2nd in 2013
Here's what caused it to stop running, how it was fixed each time, and how you can donate to make sure it does not happen again.
The First Time Bitcoin Went Down
On August 15th, 2010, a Bitcoin core developer at the time Jeff Garzik posted a new topic on the Bitcoin Talk Forum: "Strange block 74638" as he was referring to Block 74,638.
It took 1.5 hours for someone to realize the issue.
A malicious actor created 184 BILLION Bitcoin out of thin air by exploiting an error in the code. The total supply of bitcoin at the time was only supposed to be ~3.8 million out of the 21 million to ever exist. Big problem.
The code error was due to a "Value Overflow Bug." Before transactions are included in a block, nodes check to make sure the outputs do not overflow when summed. The attacker exploited an error in the code that made the overflow possible.
Within a few hours of posting about the situation, the issue was patched with the help of Satoshi and the Bitcoin blockchain was soft-forked. Shortly after, nodes began accepting the "good" forked blockchain, and the issue was resolved.
A 0.5 BTC transaction output related to the incident still exists in the "good" blockchain we all use today. While the extra billions of bitcoin sent in that transaction no longer exist. You can see it here.
The Second Time Bitcoin Went Down
On August 16th, 2013, the Bitcoin network went down for a second time at block 252,450. Bitcoin's network temporarily split into two separate networks. A post-mortem of what went wrong was captured in BIP 0500:
"A block that had a larger number of total transaction inputs than previously seen was mined and broadcasted. Bitcoin 0.8 nodes were able to handle this, but some pre-0.8 Bitcoin nodes rejected it, causing an unexpected fork of the blockchain"
To put it simply, nodes were upgrading from Version 0.7 to 0.8 and an unexpected fork occurred that should have been resolved automatically but didn't. The issue was resolved by (2) of the largest mining pools temporarily downgrading their nodes to Version 0.7.
This downgrade allowed a majority of the hashpower coming from the two pools to accept the forked chain without the large block that caused the issue. Version 0.8.1 was released and the next block with the patch was accepted, forking nodes off the network that were unpatched.
Will Bitcoin Go Down Again?
Due to these two incidents in Bitcoin's infancy, the Bitcoin network has been running 99.98824067% of the time since it began in 2009.
And Bitcoin has been running with 100% uptime since the 2013 issue.
Will Bitcoin ever go down again? I'm not sure. But the fact that both of these incidents were resolved by Bitcoin developers within hours of occurring gives me confidence that the Bitcoin network will remain resilient.
Help the network remain resilient by donating to Bitcoin developers via OpenSats—a non-profit organization committed to providing a platform with no fees and 100% passthrough of all donations to projects and the general fund.
Happy Monday,
-Pod
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Eric Podwojski
Founder, Bitcoin EDU
Twitter:Â @epodrulz
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Disclaimer: This should go without saying: This is not financial advice. This is not investment advice. I write this newsletter for education and entertainment. Act accordingly.