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Some articles were going on about the 5000 day mark met yesterday on the media, considering the number of days since the Bitcoin Network mine the genesis block on the 03/01/2009.
The interesting thing is that the network has been up 24/7 during the said period of time except for on two occasions:
In 2010, the network was down for 8 horas and 27 minutes, in order to resolve what is known as the
value overflow incident, that briefly created 184,467,440,737.09551616 bitcoins out of the blue through an exploit that was promptly patched and forked.
Then, fast forwarding to 2013, the Bitcoin network was down for a second time during 6 hours and 20 minutes due to the existance of a block with more inputs than the programming knew how to manage (an issue with the locks). Nodes with Bitcoin 0.8 managed to process the block correctly, but nodes with pre-0.8 Bitcoin versions could not, thus forking the chain. Eventually, the chain which rejected the block became the main chain for the miners as depicted by Gavin Andresen
here).
I was aware of the first case, as it has been commented on the forum multiple times, but the latter case was new to me. Related to the latter, a person managed to perform a successful double spend during the event, as
described here.
See:
https://bitcoinuptime.org/https://cointelegraph.com/news/while-the-banks-were-closed-bitcoin-reached-5-000-days-online