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Comment by mkdirp | Hacker News Reader

> The Bitcoin network has been functional for %99.98 of the time since its inception on January 3, 2009 at 02:54:25 GMT

Seems weird. What was that 0.02% when it was down? I've clearly missed it.

> Yes, the Bitcoin Network has been down two times in the past. Once in 2010 for around 9 hours, known as the Value overflow incident where a block contained a transaction that created 184 billion Bitcoins for three different addresses. The network was soft forked to not allow any more than 21 million Bitcoins ever.

> And once again in 2013 for 7 hours, known as the March 2013 Chain Fork, where a block that had a larger number of total transaction inputs than previously seen was mined and broadcasted. While Bitcoin 0.8 nodes were able to handle this, some pre-0.8 Bitcoin nodes rejected it, causing an unexpected fork of the blockchain. A new released a version 0.8.1, forked directly from 0.8.0 solved this issue without any harm to the network.

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/42961/has-the-bi...

How to get to the 99.98% figure:

9+7=16 hours of downtime since the network started to operate (Jan 3rd, 2009).

4,753 days since then, or 114,072 hours.

Uptime: (114,056 / 114,072 * 100) = 99.98% since inception.

For 16 hours to be 0.01% of the total time, bitcoin will have to be 160000 hours old, which is about 6666 days, or 1913 days from today. So on April 5th, 2027 (assuming it has no more downtime before then), bitcoin will be able to claim four-9s of reliability.

Just added two events that led downtime for Bitcoin.

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