Is there a service that alerts about attempted double spends for merchants accepting 0-confirmation transactions?

Question

I often come across merchants accepting payment in bitcoin, who require several confirmations on transactions, but where the probability of a successful double spend doesn't justify the waiting time for the user. A good example is membership payment for adult sites, where the membership can easily be withdrawn in case of a double spend, and not much is lost if a double spend is successful.

A part of the reason they do this, I think, is that they don't have a good way of knowing if a user is attempting to double spend coins sent to them.

Is there a service available that allows merchants to be notified of double spends of coins sent to them, so that they can be notified in case this happens, and take action - for example by banning the user, or just temporarily removing the deposit to an account until the transaction has 6 confirmations?

A simple service could be one where the merchant enters their deposit address at a web service, and the web service simply responds with the amount of attempted double spends, ie. if any of the inputs to the transaction that sends funds to the merchant's deposit address are attempted spent in another transaction, the request will return a number above 0.

Does such a service exist?

Answer 1

Because of the way the Bitcoin protocol with the distributed and decentralized P2P network is architected, monitoring the way you describe would do more harm than good.

If a merchant is expecting to learn of double spends, then the monitoring service needs to know of each transaction. A race attack double spend attempt might, however, communicate one transaction that reaches the merchant but a different transaction that reaches the miner that happens to include that transaction in a block. If the monitoring service sees what the miner sees, then the monitoring service would never know that the merchant had received a transaction that eventually became invalid due to the later transaction from a mined block.

So a merchant that is following the DIY route has further exposure to double spends.

Some payment processors will deliver if a 0/unconfirmed notice was sent and then later that transaction becomes invalid due to a double spend. BitPay is, I believe, one of them that will do this.

There is a need for some more utilities for aiding merchants, including transaction re-broadcast. So for example if a merchant accepts a 0/unconfirmed transaction that transaction gets rebroadcast sufficiently even if the original sender fails to re-broadcast it. Also needed might be a service that tries to ensure that if there is a blockchain fork (two or more chains both at the same height) that the confirmed transactions from one side are relayed to miners still working on the other side of the fork.

The reason these haven't already been built is that there are so few merchants currently who accept payment on 0/unconfirmed transactions. There will need to be some double spending thefts to raise awareness that this is a risk not to be ignored, especially for those merchants following the DIY path.

Answer 2

One way would be to modify the bitcoin client. The modification would change mempool so that you have a good mempool, and a bad mempool.

Normal transactions go in the good mempool. However, if you notice a transaction that spends an output that is already spent in another loose transaction, then it goes into the bad mempool.

The bad mempool is never relayed to other clients that don't have good/bad mempools, and never mined from.

It is relayed to other bad mempools, and if those see a transaction that double-spends one of their transactions, then it would alert the user.