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Craig Wright is back on timelines and this time he used the largest technical error in Bitcoin’s history to question the concept of blockchain immutability. At the center of his argument was the 2010 “value overflow incident,” when a code vulnerability caused 184,467,440,737 BTC to materialize out of nowhere.
Wright argues that this old episode proves one main point - Bitcoin’s rules are not set in stone, the code has been changed before and can be changed again, while blockchain immutability is merely a “charming doctrine” that ceases to be true after the first exception.
However, archival records and the history of related court proceedings reveal a different technical and legal context behind this activity.
Anatomy of the 2010 bug: Eliminated within five hours
On Aug. 15, 2010, at block 74,638, an unknown hacker exploited an integer overflow bug known as CVE-2010-5139. The flaw made it possible to bypass Bitcoin’s 21 million coin supply limit, creating an astronomical amount of phantom coins and putting the cryptocurrency at risk of becoming worthless.
Satoshi Nakamoto and a group of early developers quickly released an emergency patch. Miners and node operators agreed to move to the corrected blockchain branch, completely abandoning the defective chain containing billions of fraudulent coins.
Wright’s claim that this case represents an example of “fund recovery” conflicts with the historical facts on two grounds:
- Destruction, not redistribution: The phantom supply was permanently erased from the ledger rather than returned or transferred to specific users.
- Decentralized consensus: The change did not occur at the direction of a single leader, but through a collective decision by independent participants protecting their own economic interests.
Behind Wright’s arguments about blockchain flexibility lies the history of his personal legal campaigns. For several years, the Australian computer scientist pursued lawsuits against Bitcoin developers, demanding that they be forced to alter the network’s code so that he could gain access to wallets for which he did not possess the private keys.
After the High Court in London ruled in the COPA case that Craig Wright was not Satoshi Nakamoto and had forged documents, he lost his legal means of influencing the industry.
Wright’s current call to reconsider the doctrine of immutability appears to be an attempt to justify his previous lawsuits. In reality, Bitcoin’s code is regularly upgraded, as demonstrated by the Taproot update, but only for technological development and with the agreement of an overwhelming majority of participants, not to alter balances in favor of private interests.
U.Today Editorial Team
Dan Burgin
