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Double-spending

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1537: 260:, and in lack of a central authority to do so, the correct succession of transactions is defined only by the dominating consensus. This leads to the possibility of one actor gaining majority control over the entities deciding said consensus, to force their own version of events, including alternative and double transactions. Due to information propagation delays, 51% attacks are temporarily possible for a localized subset of actors too. 25: 1561: 1549: 188:, but as transactions (requests to spend money) are broadcast, they will arrive at each server at slightly different times. If two transactions attempt to spend the same token, each server will consider the first transaction it sees to be valid, and the other invalid. Once the servers disagree, there is no way to determine true balances, as each server's observations are considered equally valid. 244:
other, and eventually a single chain will continue on, while the other(s) will not. Since the longest (more technically "heaviest") chain is considered to be the valid data set, miners are incentivized to only build blocks on the longest chain they know about in order for it to become part of that dataset (and for their reward to be valid).
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The double-spending problem persists, however, if two blocks (with conflicting transactions) are mined at the same approximate time. When servers inevitably disagree on the order of the two blocks, they each keep both blocks temporarily. As new blocks arrive, they must commit to one history or the
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The total computational power of a decentralized proof-of-work system is the sum of the computational power of the nodes, which can differ significantly due to the hardware used. Larger computational power increases the chance to win the mining reward for each new block mined, which creates an
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A given cryptocurrency's susceptibility to attack depends on the existing hashing power of the network since the attacker needs to overcome it. For the attack to be economically viable, the market cap of the currency must be sufficiently large to justify the cost to rent hashing power.
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Transactions in this system are therefore never technically "final" as a conflicting chain of blocks can always outgrow the current canonical chain. However, as blocks are built on top of a transaction, it becomes increasingly costly and thus unlikely for another chain to overtake it.
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is the unauthorized production and spending of money, either digital or conventional. It represents a monetary design problem: a good money is verifiably scarce, and where a unit of value can be spent more than once, the monetary property of scarcity is challenged. As with
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by creating a new amount of copied currency that did not previously exist. Like all increasingly abundant resources, this devalues the currency relative to other monetary units or goods and diminishes user trust as well as the
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In a decentralized system, the double-spending problem is significantly harder to solve. To avoid the need for a trusted third party, many servers must store identical up-to-date copies of a public transaction
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which raised significant controversies about the safety of the network. The pool voluntarily capped their hashing power at 39.99% and requested other pools to follow in order to restore trust in the network.
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Fundamental cryptographic techniques to prevent double-spending, while preserving anonymity in a transaction, are the introduction of an authority (and hence centralization) for
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Osipkov, I.; Vasserman, E. Y.; Hopper, N.; Kim, Y. (2007). "Combating Double-Spending Using Cooperative P2P Systems".
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used a proof-of-work consensus mechanism where transactions are batched into blocks and chained together using a
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algorithm, a way to bring the servers back in sync. Two notable types of consensus mechanisms are
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that can verify whether a token has been spent. This normally represents a
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27th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS '07)
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Jaap-Henk Hoepman (2008). "Distributed Double Spending Prevention".
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Prevention of double-spending is usually implemented using an
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for the prevention of double-spending had been proposed.
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incentive to accumulate clusters of mining nodes, or
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Most decentralized systems solve this problem with a
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Its 362: 337: 109:Learn how and when to remove this message 442: 393: 346: 325: 1580: 1347: 305: 303: 145:and, particularly in offline systems, 1478:Decentralized autonomous organization 492: 309: 256:Due to the nature of a decentralized 1548: 518: 47:adding citations to reliable sources 18: 16:Failure mode of digital cash schemes 300: 13: 14: 1624: 1488:Distributed ledger technology law 1559: 1547: 1536: 1535: 173:Decentralized digital currencies 129:, such double-spending leads to 23: 138:and retention of the currency. 34:needs additional citations for 461: 436: 412: 394:Canellis, David (2020-01-27). 387: 286:obtained 51% hashing power in 153:Centralized digital currencies 1: 443:Varshney, Neer (2018-05-24). 294: 251: 7: 549:Cryptographic hash function 10: 1629: 271:One of the Bitcoin forks, 179:Blockchain § Finality 176: 1531: 1508:Initial exchange offering 1483:Decentralized application 1463:Cryptocurrency in Nigeria 1425: 1399: 1189: 1151: 1080: 1037: 968: 878: 828: 804: 788: 764: 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Index


verification
improve this article
adding citations to reliable sources
"Double-spending"
news
newspapers
books
scholar
JSTOR
Learn how and when to remove this message
counterfeit money
inflation
circulation
blind signatures
secret splitting
online
trusted third party
single point of failure
Blockchain § Finality
ledger
consensus
proof-of-work
proof-of-stake
distributed systems
cryptocurrency
Bitcoin
cryptographic protocol
linked list
blockchain

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