How Does Blockchain Bitcoin Protect Itself Against The Double-Spending Problem?

Discover how Bitcoin manages this critical problem.

Published in 2008, the Bitcoin white paper revealed to the world the first fully functional P2P cash exchange system. The father of Bitcoin, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, then released the first Bitcoin client on SourceForge in 2009 which officially gave birth to Bitcoin. A new exceptional adventure had just started.

At the heart of the phenomenal success of Bitcoin lies the resolution of the double-spending problem that had caused the loss of all other attempts to create digital currencies previously. In this article, I will return to what is the double-spending problem and I will show how the Blockchain Bitcoin solves it to be secure for all its users.

Before Bitcoin, There Was Bit Gold

Bitcoin is not the first attempt to create a functional digital money system. In 1998, Nick Szabo, a pioneer in the world of digital currencies, proposed Bit Gold before presenting his ideas in a blog article in 2005. With a little perspective, it is quite possible to imagine that Nick Szabo could have developed Bitcoin from the Bit Gold as a starting point.

However, a 2008 article on his blog about Bitcoin reveals that his views on the iconic cryptocurrency differ from those of Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin. A crucial point in Nick Szabo’s writings concerns his approach to Bitcoin.

For Nick Szabo, Bitcoin is above all a store of value and not a medium of exchange.

One of the reasons for the failure of previous attempts to create digital currencies is that, like Bit Gold, it could not solve the double-spending problem.