Topic: protection mechanics for preventing faking bitcoin (Read 193 times)

Everything is verified, recorded, and stored in the blockchain. The only thing you can do to prevent receiving "fake bitcoins" is to wait for confirmations before calling the transaction done. That's all you need to do, and the technical part would be handled by the nodes that pick-up and relay the transaction, and the miners which confirms the transaction by solving complex algorithms that require tons of hashing power and resources.

Transactions with 0 confirmations in the network are susceptible to 'double-spending' which, in essence, also feels like 'fake' bitcoins as the receiver of the said transaction will not receive anything even though the transaction appears in the blockchain. Just make sure that you are using wallets that are compatible with the bitcoin network and you're good to go.

There would be no flood in supply.

The bitcoin source code is entirely open source. I can take it and launch a fake bitcoin clone, maybe called Bitcoin Scam Version (BSV) or Bitcoin Counterfeit Holdings (BCH), tomorrow. None of the bitcoin nodes will pay me any attention, none of the miners will care, no wallet or block explorer will support my coin, and none of my transactions will be compatible with bitcoin. I can try to "flood" 21 million new coins in to the market, and they will go nowhere because they are a different coin which is completely worthless.

If someone tried to create a real bitcoin transaction which created a flood of new bitcoin out of thin air, they would need to convince the majority of nodes and miners to accept their invalid transaction, which is obviously never going to happen.

In the consumer side, it's really really easy. If you use a reputable Bitcoin wallet, and a person sends you "fake" bitcoin(a token of a different blockchain), the transaction wouldn't appear on the "recent transactions" list, or even if you search up your wallet address in a reputable Bitcoin block explorer.

El Salvador situation is indeed different - they use LN there on a specific software. But that software will work with bitcoin nodes. I don't think it works with anything else. But yes, the user should get used with the tool.
And, as help, their govt has sent them some free money. Receiving them it's a good indicator for using the right tool in the right way.

But you do have a good point about multi-coin block explorers and wallets, but if the user has a good - proper - wallet, that will work on bitcoin blockchain and he will see that something is wrong with whatever the scammer shows.
And multi-blockchain wallet and explorers should tell the full name of the coin for which they show the transactions. One has to open his eyes, though...
Plus, if anything is fishy, if anything is different than expected, one can come here and ask with clear data at hand.

I wouldn't doubt people who have used bitcoin for years, but what if:
If bitcoin had been legalized worldwide but with policies like Elsalvador (under control), then not everyone could not identify real and fake bitcoins because they were not introduced to how to transact bitcoin onchain. In fact bitcoin addresses can accept some bitcoin forks. If one day a scammer builds a phishing tx explorer site and designs the interface as if it belonged to real bitcoin's blockchain, the victims are unaware because of their ignorance.

Perhaps the OP's question is irrefutable for some reason. And what makes me believe that bitcoin can be "counterfeited" is that there are cases of wrong deposits on CEX, which BCH they thought was BTC.

All the transactions are saved in the blockchain. If a transaction is confirmed, it means that it was correct and nothing fishy/counterfeit in it. The software checks that.
Your wallet will find out from the blockchain that you received money. If the transaction is confirmed, then you are good.

It also helps understanding that your wallet never receives money, the wallet only handles the keys for spending certain (your) coins from the blockchain.


So the software takes care of everything, makes sure all the conditions are met, so when you have received money, from the moment they're confirmed, they are yours and you can be sure they're not counterfeit or anything. Since Bitcoin is not physical, I'm not sure what are your expectations about this topic; the concept is different.

As I said, on the blockchain, everything is clear and enforced.
However, you still can get scammed:
1. Buy something something else, but that's advertised as Bitcoin. There are plenty of "Bitcoin whatever" altcoins, but they use different blockchains.
2. Various services may get your money and don't send you the coins.
3. Double spend (of the same funds) is something you can easily avoid it by waiting for at least 1-2 confirmations.
4. Some may try to give you Testnet bitcoins; those are only for testing and they're on a different blockchain.
5. Make sure that you and only you have the seed/private keys for the funds. Even if you made sure your coins are not counterfeit, they are easy to be lost/stolen from you.

They already have a measure, there's a reason why we see different iterations of bitcoin, it's because they tried to fake bitcoin or duplicate but they ultimately failed.

Again :
Bitcoins is far apart from traditional currencies, the fact that you are worried about it being counterfeit is something extremely unnecessary since cryptocurrencies like bitcoins are already protected from such circumstances. Fake bitcoins?? Is there something like that?? A wallet would not actually accepting fake bitcoins in the first place. The whole thing is dependent on exchanging, sending and receiving, therefore at the end of the day you would not be able to copy the whole system code by code, it would fail terribly. It's not paper money which can be mistaken due to personal errors, it's not something so simple, it's honestly a simplified complex network which can't host fake nodes. ( Ever accidentally sent eth to a BTC address?? Something similar, wallet would not accept, it's not the same thing.  )

If someone tries to broadcast a transaction which spends "fake" bitcoin (i.e. bitcoin which don't come from a valid UTXO), then every node on the network they try to broadcast it to will attempt to verify it, fail to verify it, and then reject it. It won't be shared between nodes, won't be placed in the mempool, and won't be mined.

If you are concerned about your wallet software showing you fake balances, then you can eliminate this possibility by running your own node instead of relying on other people's nodes for your information.

There are of course whole networks of fake bitcoin altcoins going by various names, which should be avoided by everyone.

Read more.

It's called proof of work:

"Proof of work (PoW) is a decentralized consensus mechanism that requires members of a network to expend effort solving an arbitrary mathematical puzzle to prevent anybody from gaming the system."

To "fake" Bitcoin is much more expensive than faking a few bills.

The protection is already built in with the Blockchain the blockchain only displays blocks which are made valid by miners. They process each transaction on the chain and verify that it is valid. Confirmations are a way of checking that a transaction is valid. Bitcoin protection against counterfeiting is better than fiats because anyone can try to copy the paper even if they keep on changing it. Looking back at history you will see that fiat notes have been changed a huge amount of times because of the advancement of counterfeiting machines these days it is very hard to check for counterfeit notes. Retail puts you on a course to determine what are fake notes and they admit that it is becoming more difficult.

What is exacting bitcoin mechanics have for preventing faking bitcoin?
in the physical Money such as Dollar banknotes have some protection mechanism such as Type of paper and ...  (related link: https://www.wikihow.com/Detect-Counterfeit-US-Money)

P.S. I have read electronic coin definition in bitcoin white paper but I need a real example of this concept something more clearer and more understandable