Distributed Double Spending Prevention

TL;DR

This paper addresses the challenge of preventing double spending in distributed electronic payment systems, proposing solutions that enable effective prevention without central authority, and analyzing their efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces novel distributed methods for double spending prevention, challenging the belief that such prevention is fundamentally impossible in decentralized systems.

Findings

Proposed solutions achieve partial double spending prevention.

Efficiency of methods varies with network assumptions.

Some solutions are practical for peer-to-peer systems.

Abstract

We study the problem of preventing double spending in electronic payment schemes in a distributed fashion. This problem occurs, for instance, when the spending of electronic coins needs to be controlled by a large collection of nodes (eg. in a peer-to-peer (P2P) system) instead of one central bank. Contrary to the commonly held belief that this is fundamentally impossible, we propose several solutions that do achieve a reasonable level of double spending prevention, and analyse their efficiency under varying assumptions.