Conor Grogan, the director of Coinbase, who goes by “Conor” on X, remembers an uncommon occurrence that happened on the Bitcoin blockchain a number of years ago.
Evidently, this occurred in August 2010 while Satoshi was still alive. According to known history, Satoshi Nakamoto, the eponymous founder of Bitcoin, left the community in December 2010.
https://x.com/jconorgrogan/status/1708461428254879862?s=20
According to Grogan, a flaw was taken advantage of more than 13 years ago to generate 184,467,440,737 BTC. Value overflow occurred in the Bitcoin network in BTC block 74,638 mined on August 15, 2010, at 7:53:59 a.m.
The value overflow event, often known as the “184 billion bitcoin bug,” was caused by the aforementioned block. It led to the production of 184,467,440,737.09 Bitcoins that were divided evenly and the transmission of 92233720368.54 Bitcoin to two addresses.
This was made feasible because the logic for verifying transactions before putting them in a block did not take into consideration the possibility of outputs that were so enormous that they would overflow when added together.
Satoshi Nakamoto, who created Bitcoin, acted right away. Within five hours, Satoshi split the blockchain, invalidating this transaction as well as every other transaction between the fork. Surprisingly, the person who tried to use an exploit was never found.
Within five hours of the discovery, a new version of the Bitcoin client was released that included a soft fork change to the consensus rules that rejected transactions with output value overflows as well as any transaction that paid more than 21 million Bitcoins in output for any reason.
Bitcoin continues to prove functional and secure
Bitcoin has advanced significantly since its launch in 2009. The hard limit set by Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator whose real identity is still unknown, has stayed constant.
Bitcoin can no longer be mined or distributed since Satoshi set the source code’s maximum supply limit at 21 million.
The Bitcoin blockchain is seen as hack-proof since the whole network constantly audits it. Attacks on the blockchain are therefore quite rare. Bitcoin has never been the target of a 51% assault or been temporarily pulled down.
