Bitcoin History on This Day August 15

On the development timeline of Bitcoin, August 15 marks a significant event that highlighted the vulnerability of early Bitcoin and the community's rapid response capability.

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

The incident 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 patch within 5 hours, rolling back the blockchain through a soft fork and 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.