TIL in 2010 there was a Bitcoin exploit that shortly increased its supply to 184,467 billion coins

Son on August 2010 someone exploited a bug in the code that allowed them to increase the supply to 184.467 billion coins!

The bug was of an overflow type, i.e. when the software can't correctly output very large summations. The hacker did this in block number 74,638. The incident was spotted 1,5 hours later by dev Jeff Garzik. Shortly after, Gavin Adresen and Satoshi himself jumped in to try to fix it.

5 hours later Satoshi released code version 0.3.10, erasing all the transactions after the incident and therefore creating a fork.

Satoshi also urged miners to move to this "right" chain, which became dominant after 19 hours or so.

What a bunch of legends working here!