On August 15, 2010, a major vulnerability in the bitcoin protocol was exploited. The bitcoin protocol code dictates that there will only ever be 21 million bitcoins ever created. However, a vulnerability was first spotted on August 6, 2010, when it was discovered that if a transaction’s output summed to more than 2 satoshis to the 64th power, it would cause an overflow, permitting the transaction author to create arbitrary amounts of bitcoin.

Enter block 74,638. On August 15, 2010, this security flaw was exploited by a user who still remains anonymous to this day. In a single transaction, this user spent 0.5 bitcoin to send 92 billion bitcoins to two separate addresses, thus creating 184,467,440,737.09551616 bitcoins out of thin air!

The anomaly was spotted right away by Jeff Garzik. The issue was referred to as an “overflow bug,” and within hours the bug was fixed with code to reject output value overflow transaction, and the blockchain was forked by miners using an updated version of the bitcoin protocol. Since the blockchain was forked on the block below the exploited transaction, it no longer appeared in the blockchain used by the network today.

This was the only major security flaw found & exploited in Bitcoin History. The update was Bitcoin patch 0.3.10, and was implemented by Satoshi Nakamoto, who was still involved in the development of bitcoin at that time.

BTC Price: $0.07

Art details: Original digital hand painted motion art portrait. The ticker tape displays the historical daily price indexes recorded on this day.

Dimensions: 720 x 1080, 19.4 MB, Duration: 15 seconds

Created with Corel Painter, Adobe After Effects & Adobe Premiere

Artist: Denise Holt