Bitcoin has an excellent track record, with almost 100% uptime and impregnable cryptographic security. However, during the early days of Bitcoin there were many errors to resolve, and on August 15, 2010, a hacker caused an overflow incident in block 74,638, which resulted in the creation of 184.4 billion of bitcoins. The main Bitcoin developer at the time, Wladimir Van Der Laan, said: "It was the worst problem of all."
The hacker discovered that the code used to verify the transactions did not work if the results were so large that they overflowed when added up. The dedicated pirate was able to take advantage of this failure and generated 184.467 billion Bitcoins, sending 92.2 billion to 2 addresses.
Only 21 million coins will be created, so this unique transaction created 8,784 times more than the total number of possible Bitcoins per design. If this had not been solved, it could have caused an early death for Bitcoin, as the markets would crash to zero and completely ruin the credibility of the cryptocurrency.
Fortunately, the value overflow incident was noticed almost immediately and Satoshi Nakamoto implemented a code correction in 5 hours, with the help of Gavin Andresen and other developers. The new code rejected transactions that resulted in an overflow of value and any remaining activity on the network that, for whatever reason, had yielded a total of more than 21 million bitcoins.
The only way to fix the trick was to implement the code fix and restart the block chain from the moment just before the value overflow incident occurred.
This resulted in a bifurcation and 2 chains of block blocks facing each other, but in Block 74.691 the corrected block chain exceeded the chain of pirated blocks, after which all nodes accepted the corrected block chain as the main chain. and 184,400 million bitcoins disappeared.
This means that the block chain pirated with 184,400 million Bitcoins was dominant for 53 blocks, which is equivalent to approximately 9 hours. The transactions sent in the pirated blockchain during those 9 hours were reversed, which could have caused the loss of money for some Bitcoin users, and it is a very serious incident that could have significantly affected the trust in the network.
Fortunately, Bitcoin was used by only a small number of people at the time, so any damage was limited, and the incident did not prevent the cryptocurrency from becoming, in time, the global phenomenon that it is today.
Wladimir van der Laan currently serves as the main maintainer of Bitcoin core, replacing Gavin Andresen in April 2014. His role is to review the code, solve problems, test software, communicate with open source contributors and coordinate the launch of updates
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