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 ($86,939.00) 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 d...