Antonopoulos to the rescue! Sorry FUDders, no double spend here

by Team Luno
· 1 minute read

One of the main reasons Bitcoin succeeded where other digital cash failed is its solution to the double-spend problem.

This all came into question last week when CoinTelegraph published a report suggesting a $22 worth of BTC double-spend had occurred, implying the same 0.00062063 BTC had been spent twice on the Bitcoin blockchain. If it were true, Bitcoin would be rendered completely worthless. Fortunately, it wasn’t true.

The supposed double-spend debacle arose from BitMEX speculation, which later revealed “on closer inspection”, it was “likely an instance of RBF 8replace-by-fee], where the lower transaction fee won.”

Andreas Antonopoulos, a well-known Bitcoin advocate, entrepreneur and author clarified the events on Twitter, explaining it was a chain reorganisation from the Bitcoin blockchain. He added that these reorganisations are commonplace on Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains, and that when two blocks are mined “almost simultaneously”, they complete for the same height which means they both have the same parent block in the blockchain.

At the end of the day, only one of the blocks can succeed and because a block is mined every 10 minutes, only 10 minutes later would another block be mined with one of those competing blocks as its parent block.

Check out Antonopoulos’ full explanation below.

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