Bitcoin reaches 10 years uninterrupted uptime!

Bitcoin unlocked an amazing achievement: 10 years continuous uptime (3,650 days)!

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Source: https://bitcoinuptime.org

Let's go back in time. What happend in 2013 & 2010?

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2010

"On August 15 2010, it was discovered that block 74638 contained a transaction that created 184,467,440,737.09551616 bitcoins for three different addresses. Two addresses received 92.2 billion bitcoins each, and whoever solved the block got an extra 0.01 BTC that did not exist prior to the transaction. This was possible because the code used for checking transactions before including them in a block didn't account for the case of outputs so large that they overflowed when summed.

A new version of the client was published within five hours of the discovery that contained a soft forking change to the consensus rules that rejected output value overflow transactions (as well as any transaction that paid more than 21 million bitcoins in an output for any reason). The block chain was forked. Although many unpatched nodes continued to build on the "bad" block chain, the "good" block chain overtook it at a block height of 74691 at which point all nodes accepted the "good" blockchain as the authoritative source of Bitcoin transaction history.

The bad transaction no longer exists for people using the longest chain. Therefore, the bitcoins created by it do not exist either. While the transaction does not exist anymore, the 0.5 BTC that was consumed by it does. It appears to have come from a faucet and has not been used since."

Source_2010

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2013

What went wrong?

"A block that had a larger number of total transaction inputs than previously seen was mined and broadcasted. Bitcoin 0.8 nodes were able to handle this, but some pre-0.8 Bitcoin nodes rejected it, causing an unexpected fork of the blockchain. The pre-0.8-incompatible chain (from here on, the 0.8 chain) at that point had around 60% of the mining hash power ensuring the split did not automatically resolve (as would have occurred if the pre-0.8 chain outpaced the 0.8 chain in total work, forcing 0.8 nodes to reorganise to the pre-0.8 chain).

In order to restore a canonical chain as soon as possible, BTCGuild and Slush downgraded their Bitcoin 0.8 nodes to 0.7 so their pools would also reject the larger block. This placed majority hashpower on the chain without the larger block, thus eventually causing the 0.8 nodes to reorganise to the pre-0.8 chain.

During this time there was at least one large double spend. However, it was done by someone experimenting to see if it was possible and was not intended to be malicious."

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What went right ?

- The split was detected very quickly.

- The right people were online and available in IRC or could be contacted directly.

- Marek Palatinus (Slush) and Michael Marsee (Eleuthria of BTCGuild) quickly downgraded their nodes to restore a pre-0.8 chain as canonical, despite the fact that this caused them to sacrifice significant amounts of money.

- Deposits to the major exchanges and payments via BitPay were also suspended (and then un-suspended) very quickly.

- Fortunately, the only attack on a merchant was done by someone who was not intending to actually steal money

Source_2013

TL;DR

Bitcoin reaches 10 years uninterrupted uptime while many banks or centralized organisations have failed. Let's go for another 10 years (and more)!