Transaction Locking And Masternode Consensus: A Mechanism For Mitigating Double Spending Attacks

Transcript

Bitcoin and other cryptographic currencies use a distributed system called the blockchain to gain consensus across the network. To protect against double spending attacks, vendors and other merchants usually wait for confirmation from a block that the transaction being sent was valid. A double spend is where an attacker sends two competing transactions, one of them promised to a merchant (or any other party), the other back to himself. In Bitcoin a standard confirmation event on average takes 10 minutes. Depending on the needed level of security required, a merchant can require multiple of these events, taking between 30 and 60 minutes in total. In this paper, we explore a solution for Darkcoin to a long standing issue with Bitcoin and other cryptographic currencies, the ability to enable instant validation of payments without having to wait for blockchain confirmation.