- US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent praised Bitcoin (BTC) for its zero downtime, which he claimed was more functional than Democratic Party senators.
- Technically, BTC’s network actually had 14 hours of downtime from the 2010 hacking incident and the 2013 fork.
- Still, Bitcoin boasts roughly 99.99% uptime since launch in 2009.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent ended October with a short but major jab at Democratic Party Senators. He did this while commemorating the 17th anniversary of the Bitcoin whitepaper.
Bessent Uses Bitcoin Comparison to Rib Democratic Party Senators
On Friday, US President Donald Trump’s cabinet member joined the celebration of Bitcoin’s historical blueprint, which was published on October 31, 2008, by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. Then, he praised the network’s resilience and zero downtime since launch on January 3, 2009.
“17 years after the white paper, the Bitcoin network is still operational and more resilient than ever,” he said on the social media platform X. “Bitcoin never shuts down.”
However, Bessent followed it up with, “Senate Democrats could learn something from that.”
While the White House cabinet member didn’t elaborate on his statement targeting the Democratic Party senators, it implies that the bloc is either slacking off or not meaningfully contributing to the government. His comment comes amid the ongoing government shutdown due to a deadlock in the legislature over funding concerns.
Bitcoin’s Downtime Incidents
Bitcoin, together with other large-cap cryptocurrencies like Ethereum (ETH), BNB, and XRP, has almost zero downtimes compared to Solana (SOL). Bitbo only indicates two hiccups in BTC’s system.
The first was called “The Value Overflow Incident” (CVE-2010-5139) in 2010. It occurred when a hacker created over 184 million BTC utilizing a bug in the chain’s block 74638. Nakamoto patched the bug five hours later to invalidate the transaction.
The second, which was the last known significant downtime in Bitcoin, was in 2013. Bitcoin diverged or “forked” into two separate networks during this period. The problem stemmed from its nodes using two separate versions (0.7 and 0.8). The issue lasted for 24 blocks or six hours, which immediately resolved itself when one version of the chain pulled ahead of the other.
“This incident will go down in history as one of the closest moments that we have come to the underlying Bitcoin protocol actually failing,” Bitcoin Magazine highlighted. Nonetheless, it considered the 2010 event the network’s “most serious breach ever made.”
Overall, Bitcoin actually had around 14 hours of downtime. Still, its 99.99% uptime since 2009 is a strong testament to its network’s unparalleled integrity.
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