Double-spending

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Double-spending 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 counterfeit money, such double-spending leads to inflation 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 circulation and retention of the currency.

Fundamental cryptographic techniques to prevent double-spending, while preserving anonymity in a transaction, are the introduction of an authority (and hence centralization) for blind signatures and, particularly in offline systems, secret splitting.^[1]