Since January 3, 2009, the Bitcoin network has been functional for 99.98662952015% of the time. However, the protocol has had a few hiccups along the way and on a few occasions, the chain split into two. Most people are well aware of the Bitcoin Cash split that took place on August 1, 2017, but the first time the Bitcoin chain split was 11 years ago on August 15, 2010.
Strange Block 74,638
4,019 days ago on August 15, 2010, the Bitcoin community had a problem which was dubbed the “overflow bug.” What was also called a “malicious event” or “Strange block 74,638,” occurred between “11:34:43 CDT and 12:10:33 CDT on August 15th,” according to the bitcointalk.org user called “mizerydearia.” Many well known developers like Jeff Garzik, Gavin Andresen, and Bitcoin’s inventor Satoshi Nakamoto participated in addressing the issue.
Other participants involved with discussing the overflow bug incident included people like “NewLibertyStandard” and “Theymos” as well. The “output-value-overflow bug” was a critical problem because it produced 184.4 billion bitcoin (BTC). The event was not discovered until around 1.5 hours after it occurred, and the patch was finally delivered by Satoshi Nakamoto four hours later. The brunt of the entire ordeal lasted around five hours but the official codebase release by Satoshi was not finished until the next day.
Before the client fix Bitcoin 0.3.10 was released by Nakamoto, a blockchain split had happened. 51 blocks were generated on the chain that split until eventually, the “good”
