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The day someone created 184 billion Bitcoin (2020)

There are only 21 million Bitcoin in existence—but one day, 184 billion Bitcoin were conjured into being, by someone who remains anonymous to this day.

But on the 15th of August, 2010, that limit was destroyed by one person who managed to exploit a flaw to produce 184 billion Bitcoin. It took just five hours before a “soft fork” was rolled out, which reset the Bitcoin blockchain to before the bugged block and included code to reject output value overflow transactions. That Satoshi himself intervened, and did so so quickly, showed that Bitcoin was not as easily hackable as some might have assumed and built confidence in a concept which up to that point remained untested.

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