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I see a lot of questions and articles about why someone can't generate fake coins, maliciously attack the network, and essentially security discussions focused on the generation and interception of coins. With the blockchain being described as a ledger, what prevents someone from simply broadcasting a transaction moving a small amount (fractions) of coins from one account to theirs? Or can coin movements only be originated from the source address?
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Validation.
You can totally broadcast a fraudulent transaction, but nodes in the network will ignore it as it is invalid.
Furthermore, nodes will also ignore any blockchain which contains any fraudulent transaction. As a result, miners are financially disincentivized from doing so.
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When broadcasting a tx, a regular node checks for two things: Is the transaction standard, and is the transaction valid.
Standard transactions are, for simplicity's sake, transactions that create p2sh, p2pkh, p2wpkh, p2wsh, and OP_RETURN outputs. A standard transaction must also consume inputs in a few known scripts, namely multisig and regular single key scripts.
The transaction being valid is what prevents your scenario. For a transaction to be valid, a transaction must spend inputs that already exist and are unspent (unspent transaction outputs, or utxos), and the scriptsig for each input must verify. For a standard transaction, this means that the signatures on the tx must validate the script specified at output creation time.
You can try to make a fraudulent tx in two ways:
So in short, without a combination of someone's address and private key, a malicious actor cannot generate a transaction that moves coins from the target's wallet to another wallet. The transactions that are being copied over and over on the public ledger have already been securely vetted before they can be widely broadcast. – FaultyJuggler – 2018-04-05T17:14:16.057