Bitcoin Series (8) - 184.4 billion additional bitcoins
On August 15, 2010, the Bitcoin network experienced a serious security crisis. On that day, an unidentified hacker discovered a vulnerability in the Bitcoin protocol and used it to generate approximately 184.4 billion bitcoins, a number far exceeding the 21 million upper limit set by the Bitcoin system. This incident immediately attracted great attention and emergency response from the entire Bitcoin community.
After discovering the abnormal transaction, the core developers of Bitcoin acted quickly and conducted an in-depth analysis of the problem. They confirmed that this was a case of a security vulnerability being exploited due to integer overflow. In order to prevent more illegally generated bitcoins from entering the market and to maintain the stability and credibility of the Bitcoin system, the development team decided to take extraordinary measures to solve this problem.
Just a few hours later, the Bitcoin core development team released a new software version that included code to fix the vulnerability. All users running Bitcoin nodes are strongly recommended to upgrade to the latest version as soon as possible to support the revised blockchain rules. At the same time, in order to completely eliminate the impact of the attack, the Bitcoin community finally agreed to a hard fork - that is, to forcibly change the rules of the Bitcoin blockchain so that the block containing the abnormal transfer is no longer recognized as part of the legitimate historical record.
This hard fork successfully removed a large number of illegally created Bitcoins from the Bitcoin ledger and restored the normal money supply. Although this was a big test for Bitcoin, which was still in its infancy at the time, it also proved the strong cohesion and rapid response capabilities of the Bitcoin community in the face of challenges. Through this incident, Bitcoin not only overcame a major technical obstacle, but also strengthened its status as a reliable cryptocurrency.
