Year 2038 problem and year 2106 chain halting



Summary:

Bitcoin Core may stop working in 2038 due to assertion checking if the current time is non-negative. Additionally, the whole chain will halt after reaching median time 0xffffffff in 2106. This issue was brought up on the bitcoin-dev mailing list by vjudeu, who wondered if it was possible to fix in a soft-fork way. However, making Bitcoin function after 2038 would require a hard fork. One suggestion was to bundle other hard fork changes with it. More information can be found on the Bitcointalk forum.


Updated on: 2023-06-15T02:46:23.202945+00:00