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by pikchurn 3112 days ago
Hard-forked? Never. But you don't need to hard-fork to secure the network. Bitcoin HAS soft-forked several times to close of critical zero-day vulnerabilities, although to be fair this was in the early days of the network. (There was multiple ways in which any random participant could spend anyone's funds in the early days. They were all honorably disclosed and fixed without being exploited.)
2 comments
nullz 3112 days ago
There was an unintentional fork on August 15, 2010, when "[an] attacker exploited [an] integer overflow bug that permitted an attacker to create several billion bitcoins". [source][0]

There was an unintentional fork on March 12, 2013 caused by previously disallowed number of tx inputs (?) as resolved by [BIP50][1].

[0]: https://blog.blockchain.com/2016/02/26/a-brief-history-of-bi... [1]: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawi...

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pikchurn 3111 days ago
The first one was reorg'd out of the chain. It was a soft-fork, just deployed in response to something rather than in anticipation.

Likewise in the second case, where there was a temporary soft-fork put in place to limit the block size so as to not run afoul of the bug, which itself wasn't a hard-fork or a soft-fork but rather a probabilistic failure to achieve consensus under transient circumstances.

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ktta 3112 days ago
>Hard-forked? Never. But you don't need to hard-fork to secure the network.

I think the point was about vulnerability + hard-fork due to disagreement a la Ethereum Classic

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