Protocol · March 12, 2013
Bitcoin v0.8 accidental chain fork
Price at event
$44
Today
$73,594
Since then
×1662
An oversized block (225430) exposed a quiet incompatibility between v0.8's new LevelDB backend and the old BerkeleyDB lock limits in v0.7, splitting the network into two chains for roughly six hours. The fix was almost comically low-tech: major mining pools manually downgraded to v0.7 to abandon the longer chain, and the incident was canonized as BIP 50. It remains the textbook case that an unplanned consensus failure could be coordinated away by a handful of people on IRC.
⸺ Sources ⸺