Zak Cole, a blockchain protocol engineer and entrepreneur, has issued an X post to remind the crypto community, and especially Bitcoiners, about a major bug that hit Bitcoin 15 years ago, boosting its total supply to almost 200 billion BTC.
His message was that the community, which saved Bitcoin from that flaw, proved to be more important than the initial code hit by a bug.
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Day when Bitcoin broke and 184.4 billion BTC were minted
Cole reminded the community of the day that went down in history as the “value overflow incident.” Back in 2010, on Aug. 15, there was a bug in block 74638 that generated 184,467,440,737.09551616 Bitcoins for three different wallets — an amount that exceeded the 21 million BTC supply intended by Satoshi Nakamoto 8,784x.
Two of those wallets received 92.2 billion Bitcoins each. That happened a year and a half after the Bitcoin launch on Jan. 9, 2009. When it was noticed, within five hours, Satoshi Nakamoto and several other developers, including Jeff Garzik and Gavin Andresen, rolled out a new client version that contained a soft fork to prevent similar incidents in the future. At block 74691 all the nodes upgraded and the new chain overtook the old one.
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Community more important than code
Zak Cole stressed that no code is perfect and only the community can notice flaws and bugs and remove them timely on this example of Bitcoin, whose code is praised as flawless by many Bitcoin maximalists.
“Bitcoin’s scarcity is not protected by code. It’s protected by people,” Cole stated. “The only reason Bitcoin didn’t die that day is because someone noticed. Bitcoin’s monetary policy was rescued, not by the protocol, but by the humans running it.”
