Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin => Bitcoin Discussion => Topic started by: Frodo on April 21, 2011, 10:56:23 PM



Title: Double wallet
Post by: Frodo on April 21, 2011, 10:56:23 PM
Alice has money on its wallet. Bob copy its wallet and send all money. On Alice wallet not this transaction, she send money. Can she send money? How prevent against theft?


Title: Re: Double wallet
Post by: Pieter Wuille on April 21, 2011, 11:00:02 PM
The wallet does not contain the coins. It contains the keys to spend coins which are assigned to the corresponding addresses. The coins themselves, if such a thing exists, are kept by the network.

If you try to spend a coin twice, the network will only accept the first transaction to do so.


Title: Re: Double wallet
Post by: Bruce Wagner on April 21, 2011, 11:00:49 PM
Alice has money on its wallet. Bob copy its wallet and send all money. On Alice wallet not this transaction, she send money. Can she send money? How prevent against theft?

No.

If they both have a copy of the SAME wallet....  Then whoever spends the money first, can spend it.

The second attempt to send the same bitcoins will not be allowed, and will be prevented by the bitcoin network.


Title: Re: Double wallet
Post by: Frodo on April 21, 2011, 11:28:56 PM
Thus only way to prevent against theft is bitcoin client with encryption else trojan can steal.


Title: Re: Double wallet
Post by: Timo Y on April 22, 2011, 12:48:57 AM
only way to protect yourself from Sauron's tempation is never wear ring, evar.

only way to prevent your bitcoins be stolen is never spend them, evar.



Title: Re: Double wallet
Post by: TiagoTiago on April 22, 2011, 04:28:17 AM
even without spending, just by having the wallet file unencrypted in your disk you are already open to the possibility of your money being stolen. Even if the wallet is encrypted, there is still the risk some malware might sniff the data while a program decrypts it to RAM. And even if you don't launch any program that touches the wallet yourself, malware could still do it unatended, if you saved the password for decrypting it that could be used, or the malware could transmit the encrypted file to the attacker's machine and the attacker could attempt to find the password using a dictionary and even a bruteforce attack.


There are all sorts of ways your coins could get stolen