How someones made 184 Billion Bitcoin appear out of nowhere

[Wintersoldier]

I see, after this incident, Satoshi left and stay anonymous, does it somehow mean that the problem that a bitcoin technology will face in the latter future is 100 % zero? Meaning, that bitcoin will be invulnerable to attacks? If this is the case, we should really adore Satoshi's contribution to blockchain technology. if this scenario will still occur like:

That hacker is not so evil. He exposed the bug in a time when things could be easily fixed. Thank God that happened long ago, and not recently.

We're all stop with a big stung on ourselves looking at how our bitcoin will turn into losses. This reminds me that belief about "There's no safe system" is somehow true because before, I do really think that bitcoin is invulnerable even in beta.

[alyssa85]

I am genuinely interested on how this will be handled, if something like that happened now.    There are a lot more transactions being done now and

I wonder if miners would all work together to "rewind" the Blockchain, if it happened again. I think it is in everyone's interest to do this again, because

losing a few coins with a "rewind" is better than losing the value of every other coin you own, if miners did not want to participate. Fortunately for us, a

lot more eyes are currently on the Open source code and also on what is happening on the Blockchain, so it will even be spotted a lot quicker now.  

The only way it would happen again is if they did a soft fork that had mistakes. Most forks carry some mistakes - the last steem fork had so many bugs they had to rapidly release fixes - luckily in the steem universe the top twenty witnesses decide what version to run, so it's easy to correct.

With bitcoin it would be much harder given that the miners are numerous and you'd have to persuade them one by one to run the corrected version - that's kind of why the devlopers are so resistent to "improvements" and are so conservative about soft forks. Forks carry loads of risks.

[franky1]

The only way it would happen again is if they did a soft fork that had mistakes.

nope
people are to reliant on core. and even just last year there was a bug at software level that ignored doing a vital check at a certain time, this meant it could have been exploited to create more coins.

luckily it was not exploited. but the problem is if it was exploited everyone has become reliant on core to hand out a patch, which should they choose to or not becomes a question. not a certainty.

we are not in the 2010 scenario of everyone coding their own independant clients and if there is a bug patching it themselves. instead the community is reliant on core.
we are not as decentralised as we may think

[bearexin]

Wow, I would have not have known this if not because you dug it up which I will make more of my finding too to verify this because all the years that I have been using bitcoin, I have never heard that it was once hacked, but it is a good thing that the bug was found before satoshi left the forum or left bitcoin, if the bug had been after satoshi disappeared, this would have been a very big disaster for bitcoin and would have tarnished its name in the heart off people.

This shows how very important satoshi is in the activities of bitcoin, and I don’t know why he disappeared. I believe that if he was still around, maybe all these hackers would have actually found it quite difficult to be doing all the things they are doing that is discouraging cryptocurrency users.

[qiman]

I never knew of this incident and things could have turned out really differently if the hacker had won the day. Good job Satoshi Nakamoto and the general consensus at the time took the Bitcoin core 3.01 as the dominant chain and saved the day, otherwise we would not have the flourishing market we know as the CMC today and so many people making and generating the wealth they have generated over the past ten years, thanks to the Bitcoin story that has evolved thus far.

[hatshepsut93]

If Satoshi Nakamoto had been unable to rectify the hack, Bitcoin would almost certainly have died. Basically, there would have been no cryptocurrency industry to speak of. Bitcoin’s price would have dropped like a stone, and within 24 hours the entire system could have collapsed.

I don't agree with this conclusion, that bug was just a programming error, if Satoshi wouldn't fix it, someone else would fork Bitcoin and do it instead. Maybe Bitcoin would have had worse reputation if it took too long to fix that bug, but there's nothing fundamental about that bug that would kill the idea of cryptocurrency. We had some big disasters in altcoins, and they are still alive and well, like Ethereum and the DAO, for example.

[JessicaVL]

I didn't know about this history.
Are there any reference of this event here in bitcointalk forum? Something written by Satoshi?

That hacker is not so evil. He exposed the bug in a time when things could be easily fixed. Thank God that happened long ago, and not recently.

Hahaha! That's an interesting take on it! It's certainly fortunate that it happened earlier rather than now. Can you imagine if the bug was only exposed now? Yikes.

[2double0]

Was the hacker able to use those fake generated coins in trading? Even 0.01% of that would have been enough to work as a bounty for hacker if he was able to get it. Sigh that there was a flaw but I'm sure we are not going to witness that ever again. If not completely destroyed, the hacker would have taken partial advantage of that hack?

And nice article you have brought to us.

[pgbit]

I definitely didn't know about this even though I pride myself in learning all about Bitcoin from it's earliest developement stage, reading this felt like reading a thriller and my heart actually pounded when it came to the part about how Satoshi fixed the issue within just a few hours after it was reported and returned normalcy to the bitcoin network, always thought that Bitcoin cane out perfect from the beginning but I prefer the way it happened, it simply means that it was improved and is now as strong as it is ever going to be.

[hahahafr]

Are there any reference of this event here in bitcointalk forum? Something written by Satoshi?

Yes.

The incident was initially spotted and flagged up by Jeff Garzik here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=822.0

The main thread in Development & Technical Discussion is here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=823.0

It actually seems like Gavin Andresen wrote a temporary fix first, before satoshi wrote a permanent fix about 20 minutes later.

satoshi then released this as version 0.3.10 a few hours later: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=827.0

That's was a timely intervention on the part of these developers you know and i think the crypto industry is indebted to them for this quick solution that they had to fix in the shortest time possible. I really have a catching up to do to get to the crust of this matter. Though it's way into the past but every tiny bit of information in this industry is worth it!