Blockchain protocol engineer and entrepreneur Zak Cole has issued an X-post to the Crypto community, particularly Bitcoiner, on the major bug that hit Bitcoin 15 years ago, increasing its total supply to around 200 billion BTC.
His message was that the community that saved Bitcoin from its flaws proved more important than the first code that the bug was hit.
The day Bitcoin was broken and 184.4 billion BTC was created
Cole reminded the community of a day that fell in history as a “value overflow incident.” On August 15th, 2010, there was a bug in block 74638 that generated 184,467,440,737.09551616 Bitcoin for three different wallets.
On August 15th, 2010, Bitcoin broke.
A bug in block 74638 created 184 billion BTC from thin air. That’s not a typo. Two outputs of 92 billion BTC each slipped off as the code didn’t check for integer overflows. The system accepted it. Bitcoin’s sacred 21 million…
– Zak.eth (@0xzak) March 29, 2025
Two of these wallets each received 92.2 billion bitcoins. It happened a year and a half after Bitcoin was released on January 9th, 2009. Within five hours, several other developers, including Nakamoto at, Jeff Garzick and Gavin Andresen, deployed new client versions with soft forks to prevent similar incidents in the future. In block 74691, all nodes were upgraded and the new chain overtook the old one.
Community is more important than code
Zak Cole emphasized that the code is not perfect, and that only the community can notice flaws and bugs and remove them in a timely manner in this example of Bitcoin.
“The rarity of Bitcoin is not protected by the code. It is protected by people,” Cole said. “The only reason Bitcoin didn’t die that day is because someone noticed. Bitcoin’s monetary policy was rescued by the people who run it, not by the protocol.”
