What It Means to Double Spend

Hello steemians, in my recent post here where I discussed that one of the damages caused during a 51% to a blockchain network is double spending. I did not fully explain the subject matter of double spending itself. Now I am going to do justice to the meaning of double spending

Lets Start

Most question people ask when they start dipping their heads into blockchain, bitcoin and cryptocurrency technology at large and when they still don't understand how the whole thing works is that; since there is no central authority controlling the trabsactions logs on a blockchain network, how is it not possible for a user to pretend to send digital token out but actually the original token is still with the sender(this is known as double spending). This is the issues with digital information as it can be replicated and sent twice. Physical currency doesn't has this problem since both parties involved can verify the legitimacy of the currency before transactions can be finalised.

The solution of bitcoin to this issue is an complex algorithms which involves using a lot of computing power to solve. This makes is extremely difficult for hackers to carry out any fraudulent activities on the blockchain which involves double spending. Also most activities which are fraudulent are not from hackers but from mistakes of users compromising their password or private keys.

Picture used is from Pixabay