Why This Exec Says Bitcoin Is the ‘Most Reliable Monetary System’

By Adrian Zmudzinski

There's a strong case to be made for claiming that Bitcoin is the "most reliable monetary system," according to Riot Platforms executive Pierre Rochard.

In a Jan. 5 tweet, Rochard, vice president of research at the crypto mining firm, claimed that “Bitcoin is engineered to be the most reliable monetary system in the world for savings and payments.” His statement is backed by Bitcoin's uptime of almost 99.99% since its launch on Jan. 3, 2009.

So far, Bitcoin has reported only two downtime events: One in 2010 and one in 2013. In 2010, Bitcoin went down due to the “value overflow incident.”

As the Bitcoin wiki recounts, the value overflow incident occurred on Aug. 15, 2010, when miners approved block 74638 with a transaction that created over 184,467,440,737 BTC for three separate addresses. Two of those addresses received 92.2 billion BTC, and the miner who mined the block received an extra 0.01 BTC, which shouldn’t exist either.

The transaction in question exploited a value overflow vulnerability. When the value is set too high, the check on how much Bitcoin can be spent is not performed correctly. This is known as a stack overflow vulnerability.

Within five hours of discovering the faulty block, Bitcoin developers published a soft fork that resolved the issue and rejected the illegitimately created Bitcoin. This fork split the blockchain into two, but the right blockchain took hold at a block height of 74691.

Then, in 2013, it was a bug linked to CVE-2013-3220 that caused downtime on the network. downtime. The Bitcoin network split into two as versions 0.7 and 0.8 of the node software diverged, and a non-malicious actor mistakenly executed a large double spend.

Unlike in 2010, Bitcoin had already seen some adoption before the bug caused a 23% price fall. The issue was resolved by widely rolling back to version 0.7.

After those two early incidents, Bitcoin has operated without issues for years. Last week, Rochard tweeted that the Bitcoin network processed “more than $19 trillion worth of BTC transactions in 2024.” According to him, this proved “that Bitcoin is both a store-of-value and a medium of exchange.”

As of press time, the Bitcoin price has made its way north of $102,000, the first time it's seen six figures in the new year. BTC has gained 4.2% in the past day and 11% compared to this time last week, according to CoinGecko data.

Things weren't always looking this rosy, though. Earlier today, before BTC climbed past $100,000, Obchakevich Research founder Alex Obchakevich told Decrypt that “if we see a breakout of the $100k resistance level this week, it will be a powerful signal for further growth.”

Tom Wan, Head of Data at Entropy Advisors also suggested that “Bitcoin’s price is poised to retest $100,000 soon,” after reaching this milestone for the first time in early December. He highlighted that “we’ve seen a strong start to the year with $908M in BTC ETF net inflows on January 3, 2025, marking the 5th highest single-day inflow since BTC ETFs were launched.”

According to Wan, those inflows highlight the sustained interest in Bitcoin from institutional investors “fueled by optimism around the U.S. market potentially expanding under the upcoming Trump administration.” He expects that more financial advisors, pension funds, family offices, private banks, corporations, and asset managers will gain access to Bitcoin ETFs and make larger allocations to those products.

Furthermore, Wan pointed out that BTC perpetual funding rates have decreased significantly, “dropping from overheated levels of around 20% back to a more normalized rate of approximately 10%.” He highlighted that “this suggests that a market deleveraging event has occurred, resetting the market dynamics and potentially paving the way for continued growth."

Edited by Stacy Elliott.

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