Assets, Bitcoin

How Does Bitcoin Solve Double-Spending?

Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency, without a central bank or single administrator, that can be sent from user to user on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network without the need for intermediaries. Transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain.

Bitcoin is unique in that there are a finite number of them: 21 million.

Bitcoins are created as a reward for a process known as mining. They can be exchanged for other currencies, products, and services.

As of February 2015, over 100,000 merchants and vendors accepted bitcoin as payment.[12].

NOTE: WARNING: Double-spending is a serious problem in the world of cryptocurrency, and Bitcoin does not have a foolproof solution. While Bitcoin has implemented measures to reduce the risk of double-spending, it is still possible for users to attempt it. Therefore, users should use caution when sending or receiving payments with Bitcoin and should be aware that double-spending is still a possibility.

Research produced by University of Cambridge estimates that in 2017, there were 2.9 to 5.

8 million unique users using a cryptocurrency wallet, most of them using bitcoin.[13].

The double-spending problem is the result of fraudulent attempts to spend the same digital currency more than once. Bitcoin solves this problem by maintaining a universal ledger (the blockchain) of all transactions that have ever taken place.

This ledger is distributed across the entire network of Bitcoin users and is constantly being verified by all parties involved. This verification process makes it impossible to spend the same Bitcoins more than once because doing so would require altering the ledger in such a way that all other users would be able to tell that the transaction had been tampered with.

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