$BTC On August 15, 2010, Bitcoin faced a critical vulnerability that nearly led to its collapse. A single transaction in block 74,638 exploited an integer overflow bug, creating 184,467,440,737 BTC—over 8,800 times the total supply cap of 21 million. This flaw allowed two addresses to receive approximately 92.2 billion BTC each, threatening the very foundation of Bitcoin's scarcity model.Medium+4Binance+4Investing.com+4Wikipedia+4GitHub+4Medium+4

The issue, identified as CVE-2010-5139, was due to a flaw in the code that failed to properly check large transaction outputs, allowing the creation of vast amounts of Bitcoin from thin air . Within hours of the exploit, Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, along with early developer Gavin Andresen, released version 0.3.10 of the Bitcoin client. This update included a soft fork that rejected transactions with output value overflows, effectively nullifying the fraudulent coins and reverting the blockchain to a state before the exploit .Wikipedia+1CoinDesk+1U.Today+4CoinCodex+4Medium+4GitHub+3Medium+3Investing.com