At 19:13 UTC on Sunday August 15, 2010, an unknown actor broadcast a transaction that exploited a signed-integer overflow in the validation code. The transaction created 184,467,440,737.09551616 BTC, more than 8,000x the supply that should ever exist, and split it between two addresses. The next miner picked it up. Block 74,638 carried the bug into the chain.
By 23:30 UTC, in just over four hours, Satoshi had committed a patch and released v0.3.10. The code change was small. The hard part was getting node operators to run it and miners to start a new chain from block 74,637, ignoring everything that followed. About 19 hours after the bad block, the patched chain caught up and the bad chain was orphaned. 53 blocks rolled back. The 21 million bitcoin hard cap held.
I just shipped a full postmortem on this as a Learn Bitcoin rabbit hole. The interesting part isn't that there was a bug; software has bugs, and this one was a textbook "footgun" any programmer of the era could have written. The interesting part is that every step of the response, (the bug report, the patch, the chain reorg) happened in public, on open source, with the receipts. The cap held because the people running nodes wanted it to hold, not because anyone could compel them.
Full breakdown, including the subsequent BIP 42 incident (a second infinite-supply bug, found by Pieter Wuille in 2014) and why what happened in 2010 was technically a hard fork even though it gets called a soft fork:
https://www.learnbitcoin.com/rabbit-hole/inflation-bug-postmortem
Bitcoin only. No bullshit. Have fun.
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