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I'm a complete beginner to anything and everything about cyrpto. I've been trying to research a lot about it, and I have recently just been trying to learn and understand some of the basics.
I was wondering if double spending ever happens at all?
Does it happen every day, rarely, or not at all?
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This question is difficult as only the miners can answer it 100% correctly, but let me try:
You need to differentiate between:
Double-Spending is not really possible because of the consensus. The miners need to check wheather the bitcoins are still unspent. But: The scenario of a chain-fork (because of a 51% attack or a bug) could cause a temporary double-spend-problem. This guy tells about a bug that caused a chain-fork of 26 blocks and multiple double spends (but that seems to be happend only once).
It's not illigal to try it (so far, as I know). I tried it because I wanted to know how it works. I think, a lot of people experimented to send the same bitcoin to 2 or more different addresses at the same time but of course it did not work.
RBF is interesting application of "trying to double-spend". – sanket1729 – 2018-03-28T08:39:26.113
Related: There is a website to track doublespends on Bitcoin Cash: https://doublespend.cash/
– Murch – 2018-12-14T18:46:04.943