The event occurred on March 11, 2013, at the height of block 225,430 of the Bitcoin network. The fork happened by accident right after an update of the bitcoind nodes.
Since Bitcoin appeared in the financial world, more than 15 forks of its protocol went through a successful process, most of them due to changes and agreements coming from the community. However, there is also a record of unexpected events that have put the record of its operations in check; as such events took place this month but eight years ago.
March 11, 2013. It was on this date when Bitcoin users started to note to report weird information from the network. Some developers pointed out that the blockchain just reached block 225,431, while others stated that block 225,430 had recently been mined. There was a difference of one block in the registers of diverse servers.
They still did not know that an unexpected hard fork had occurred and that they were looking over records from two parallel chains. At that time, there were two bitcoin blockchains under a similar mining process. This situation placed under risk the network’s operation since a monetary system cannot hold two ledgers simultaneously and continue to work as functional money.
An update to the bitcoind node client is what had caused the unexpected fork. The community was facing an accidental hard fork that needed an urgent solution as soon as possible to avoid the collapse of bitcoin’s price and keep order in the consensus of the network.
That March 2013 is a Date to Remember
The fork happened in the bitcoind code (BerkeleyDB) complete migration to a more advanced one (LevelDB). The developers of this software accidentally implemented a change in the Bitcoin protocol rules.
The new customer removed a database lock limit essential for gathering vital information and transactions on the network. While in Bitcoin, the block is 10,000 BDB (big data block) according to its consensus rules, this new version of the bitcoind client did not have any limitations.
The fork started its way in block 225,430. With the mobilization of the prominent companies of that time – Bitpay, BitcoinStore, and MtGox -, together with the mining operators, there were chances to set a reversion and let the original chain lead the way. The node operators rolled back the bitcoin update, reinstalling the previous version (0.7.2), and everything went back to normal for block 225.454.
The event brought with it serious consequences. Mining profit losses of $ 26,000 reports started to enlighten the community as miners from the scrapped chain claimed rewards of 25 BTC per mined block. Knowing that 24 blocks were in the mining process in parallel, this represents about 600 BTC, which as of today would be worth more than 35 million dollars.
By 2015, three years after the unexpected fork on March 11, an accidental hard fork appeared to amaze the community once again. However, this situation came to good terms relatively quickly, and only six parallel blocks were active before the miners returned to the consensus of the original network. A series of events have left scars of war on Bitcoin, but that has also made it a more solid network to face this kind of situation.
By: Jenson Nuñez
