We have heard many people say that Bitcoin since its launch has never had a problem nor has it ever "been turned off".
But is this true?
Does Bitcoin have a 100% uptime?
No, Bitcoin does not have 100% uptime, but 99.985%.
There were 2 problems in the first few years of Bitcoin that made it 14 hours and 47 minutes of dowtime.
What form do these events take?
Let's explain each one of them:
On August 15, 2010, it was identified that block 74638 had a transaction that created a huge number of bitcoins (184 467 440 737.09551616 BTC).
The problem existed due to the fact that the code that checked the transactions before including them in the block did not validate the outputs when they were greater than the maximum supply limit.
This led to a fork being made to implement the correction and reject the problematic block.
On March 20, 2013, it was identified that a block had a higher number of total transaction entries than those validated in the previous block.
At that time there were OSes on the network with different versions and the pre-0.8 versions rejected this block while versions 0.8 or higher accepted the block.
This meant that there was an unexcepted fork.
The problem was eventually fixed for pre-0.8 versions and higher summers.
I hope you enjoyed hearing about this curiosity about the bitcoin network.