ChainCatcher news, Corn co-founder Zak Cole posted on the X platform that Bitcoin was created out of thin air due to a bug on August 15, 2010, resulting in approximately 184 billion BTC. This “value overflow event” caused two wallets to receive about 92 billion BTC. Satoshi Nakamoto and several other developers (including Jeff Garzik and Gavin Andresen) launched a new client version with a Soft Fork five hours later to prevent similar incidents in the future, with all nodes upgrading at Block 74691, and the new chain replaced the old chain.
Zak Cole stated that the event illustrates that the scarcity of Bitcoin is actually protected by people, not by code. The only reason Bitcoin did not perish that day was that someone noticed the issue and published a fix, removing the invalid block from consensus within five hours. Bitcoin was saved not because of the protocol, but because of the people running the protocol; this is the truth behind the “decentralized trust” narrative. It was not the code that saved Bitcoin, but the community that saved Bitcoin.
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