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August 15, 2010Crises & controversyFailures & lossesdocumented

The value-overflow incident creates 184 billion BTC

A validation bug allowed one transaction in block 74,638 to create outputs totaling more than 184 billion bitcoin.

Developers released corrected software within hours, and participants reorganized onto a chain that rejected the invalid transaction. The erroneous chain was overtaken after 53 blocks, eliminating the unintended coins from the accepted ledger.