# Gavin Andresen
# 2011-09-24 18:27:27
# https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=45410.msg543096#msg543096

@s{quotedtext}
@s{quotedtext}
 @p{brk}
A real crash. @p{par}

In a perfect world, Bitcoin version 0.1 would have included code that looked for a "Bitcoin version X or later required to read this wallet.dat file" setting, and notify the user and exit cleanly if X is greater than the version you're running. @p{par}

We don't live in a perfect world. @p{par}

So the second-best solution was to have version 0.4 and later do the "Bitcoin version X or later required to read this wallet.dat file" thing.  And write a value into the wallet that causes previous versions of bitcoin to crash on startup. @p{par}

If previous versions didn't crash when given an encrypted wallet, they'd just ignore the encrypted keys, generate a bunch of new, unencrypted keys, and give people heart attacks when they ran the old version of bitcoin and told them they had a 0 bitcoin balance. @p{brk}