In November 2010, two Bitcoin blocks accidentally repeated transaction IDs from earlier blocks.

In November 2010, two Bitcoin blocks accidentally repeated transaction IDs from earlier blocks.

The result? 100 BTC became permanently unspendable.

Bitcoin still contains two special consensus exceptions for those exact blocks.

how did #Bitcoin manage to erase its own coins without a single transaction spending them?

Early Bitcoin allowed identical coinbase txs (no inputs to differentiate them). In Nov 2010 two pairs of byte-identical coinbases appeared, sharing the same txid. Nodes keyed the UTXO set by txid, so the later tx simply overwrote the earlier entry and deleted its 50 $BTC outputs with no spend transaction. That permanently erased 100 BTC. BIP30 later forbade overwriting any unspent txid, with two hardcoded exceptions only for those historic blocks.

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