Exactly 10 Years ago someone found a bug in bitcoin code that allowed him to transfer 184M bitcoins to 3 different address .
On August 15 2010, it was discovered that block 74638 contained a transaction that created 184,467,440,737.09551616 bitcoins for three different addresses.[1][2][3] Two addresses received 92.2 billion bitcoins each, and whoever solved the block got an extra 0.01 BTC that did not exist prior to the transaction. This was possible because the code used for checking transactions before including them in a block didn't account for the case of outputs so large that they overflowed when summed.[4]
A new version of the client was published within five hours of the discovery that contained a soft forking change to the consensus rules that rejected output value overflow transactions (as well as any transaction that paid more than 21 million bitcoins in an output for any reason).[5] The block chain was forked. Although many unpatched nodes continued to build on the "bad" block chain, the "good" block chain overtook it at a block height of 74691[6] at which point all nodes accepted the "good" blockchain as the authoritative source of Bitcoin transaction history.
The bad transaction no longer exists for people using the longest chain. Therefore, the bitcoins created by it do not exist either. While the transaction does not exist anymore, the 0.5 BTC that was consumed by it does. It appears to have come from a faucet and has not been used since.[7]
source :
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incidentHow I even know this ?
I know a guy that I've been to school with and he's been with bitcoin since 2010, while I criticized it and ignored it . lately we've been catching up and talk a lot, he said basically someone is probably manipulating the network in different way while we are unaware of.
"The 184M transaction was bold, everyone could have seen it. In the real world if A really good hacker would do the job , he would do it without us noticing, it will be under the surface, it might be too late if ever could someone else even notice"
I wanted to ask the community what do you think of that ?
could there ever be a way that someone else is using the network to benefit his own needs while exploiting some bug in the network we cant even see?
or that's not possible and he is fooling me ?