What if Bitcoin dies?

Pierre Rochard
2 min readFeb 21, 2021

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Bitcoin has actually died in the past, twice. The first time Bitcoin actually died was in 2010 due to an inflation bug in the software that enabled anyone to create an infinite amount of bitcoin. Bitcoin was resurrected by node operators before the developers even patched the code, as they rolled the blockchain back to the last known valid block. The second time that Bitcoin died was in 2013, when a flawed new version of the node software caused the block size limit to accidentally be increased. To resurrect Bitcoin, the node operators changed their software back to the previous version. Those are the only two times Bitcoin has died, and in both cases Bitcoin was promptly resurrected by the collective will of its users. Bitcoin is the world’s most robust and reliable monetary system because it is open source and decentralized. These fundamentals have caused a rapid adoption, and have resulted in a series of inevitable market cycles due to human psychology. Critics of Bitcoin’s monetary policy use the purchasing power drawdowns, after parabolic revaluations, as arguments against using Bitcoin, or even learning anything about it, as it is “dead” anyway. Few of these critics understand what happened when Bitcoin actually died, twice.

Image from https://www.cryptocurrency10.com/en/blog/bitcoin-trends/is-the-bitcoin-dead

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