Bitcoin History on This Day August 15

On the development history of Bitcoin, an iconic event occurred on August 15, highlighting the vulnerability of early Bitcoin and the community's quick response capability.

The 'Value Overflow Incident' in 2010. On this day, an unknown individual exploited an integer overflow vulnerability in the Bitcoin code, creating approximately 184.467 billion bitcoins in block 74638, far exceeding the total supply limit of 21 million. This vulnerability stemmed from overflow when summing transaction output values that were too large, resulting in verification failure.

The event was discovered by developer Jeff Garzik on the Bitcointalk forum, who exclaimed, 'The output value of this block 74638 is very strange!'

The mysterious founder Satoshi Nakamoto released a fix within 5 hours, rolling back the blockchain through a soft fork, erasing these illegal bitcoins.

This is regarded as the only major security vulnerability exploited in Bitcoin's history, which, if not promptly fixed, could have ended Bitcoin.