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Few things have been built to stand the test of time. Bitcoin is.
Engineers design bridges so that they last only about 100 years. Modern dams only earn it in half of that.
Perhaps regular maintenance could extend these numbers by decades. They will still collapse much faster than Bitcoin intended.
Today marks the 11th anniversary of this proof. The BIP-42 is a clutch proposal that avoided a potential supply crisis 240 years later.
Bitcoin core contributor Peter Euille submitted BIP-42 on April Fool’s Day, 2014, years after Nakamoto’s last post. The BIP-42 was based on the solution proposed by Gregory Maxwell. Appropriately, it was very serious and at the same time deeply and unsafe.
BIP-42 has doubled as a roast of Nakamoto Atoshi (sauce)).
After all, Satoshi made a serious and ambiguous error when coding the logic for Bitcoin halving.
Block rewards were half-halved for every 210,000 blocks, and by around 2140 it had been set correctly to a small percentage of SAT. This makes BTC supply predictable and empirically finite.
However, this code was written in a way that uses the current block height to determine the mining reward. And, while too high blocks are much higher than today, Satoshi had to write special rules that would inform the software how to safely handle such calculations.
The exact effect of the bug is not well known, but the biggest result of the unintended outcome was that the block reward was restored to its original state of 50 BTC. The BTC supply issuance curve will be restarted in 2009.
Unchecked, the bugs return again and again every two and a half centuries, creating potentially endless bitcoin over thousands of years.
Bitcoin’s circular supply reached 126 million in 3417 without fixing the supply bug.
“It is widely believed that Satoshi is an inflation-hate gold bug, but he never said this. In fact, Bitcoin’s money supply has been programmed to grow indefinitely,” writes Euille.
What’s humble is that we cancelled the intense event that BIP-42 occurred. Now 10 generations – In the approximate year of 2265, the block height should reach 1,344 million (more than 890,000 today). This is more than a century since the last slice of spendable bitcoin was expected to be mined in 2140.
So I think I would like to thank our wonderful, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great,
– David
Lizzo’s view as a Bitcoin historian
It’s nice that David can laugh with BIP-42. This is one of the more objectively quirky events in the history of Bitcoin development. That said, a more calm rating raises troubling questions about managing Bitcoin software.
What I always endure is the natural tension over what defines a “bug” in Bitcoin. When considering the BIP-42 through the lens of law, it helped to ensue two interesting views.
- The first is the code that the BIP-42 patch is in fact a “bug” – that Bitcoin has a fixed supply, as it contradicts what Satoshi wrote.
- The second is the view that the code is a “bug.” Because it contradicts what he told users to expect (creates a kind of social contract).
