Bitcoin’s Phenomenal Success Since Its Inception Highlighted Through 10 Essential Metrics

Since its inception in January 2009, Bitcoin has achieved 99.98% availability. This figure is quite extraordinary but it is true. During its 11 years of existence, Bitcoin has been criticized and attacked from all sides.

Despite all the attacks it has suffered, Bitcoin has continued to function properly block after block.

In its history, Bitcoin has experienced two major events in which the network was not operational for more than 6 hours.

The most serious one being known as the “Value overflow incident” and occurred on August 15, 2010. It was then discovered that block 74,638 contained a transaction that created 184,467,440,737.09551616 Bitcoins for three different addresses.

Two different addresses then received 92.2B Bitcoins each and the validator of the block received 0.01 BTC which did not exist prior to the transaction.

This problem was possible because the source code used to verify transactions before including them in a block did not take into account the case where the outputs were so large that they caused an overflow when summed.

This incident highlighted the strength of the Bitcoin developer community as it took only a few hours for a fixed version of the Blockchain to be deployed.

In the end, Bitcoin was only unavailable for 8 hours and 27 minutes during this incident. The correct version of the Bitcoin Blockchain took over from block 74,691.