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An online store recently received a payment via a wallet-to-wallet BTC payment. But after a while the total_received value went down to zero on blockchain.info. Now the address cannot be sweeped as there is no balance so the merchant assumed that the money is lost/stolen.

Tradeblock seems to have more details for this transaction:

https://tradeblock.com/bitcoin/address/1L1MSa36vaSeo8myBcGfGA3UddGDitZXai

Here's another similar one "suspected" from the same user:

https://tradeblock.com/bitcoin/address/1KsVJ1ySWVmVD5uci4mSuT98Uj65VpEzD

(icon at the rightmost column of each transaction has more details)

Can someone pls explain the anatomy of this - how to interpret and how to rectify (if at all possible).

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Conflicting transactions are simply two or more transactions that spent the same UTXO in its inputs (i.e. doublespending).

The only remedy is to not treat a transaction as successful until it has a number of confirmation that satisfies you.

It is impossible to recover from a successful doublespend attack should the conflicting transaction be included in the blockchain.

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  • Looking a the inputs and outputs, does it look like the transaction was initiated with zero fees? If so it seems strange as most wallets commonly do not initiate transactions with low/no fees.
    – Fakeer
    Commented Dec 8, 2016 at 21:49
  • I don't see how does that help. The point is you can create transactions that pay zero or more fees. Whether or not they confirm is another matter.
    – rny
    Commented Dec 9, 2016 at 6:01
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    Thanks for the responses. Due to mostly smaller sized transactions the merchant cannot wait for confirmations. Given this primary constraint I'm trying to find out how to take precautions to minimize double spend attacks. That's why I was trying to identify some parameters that can be used for defence - e.g. not accepting zero fee Txs. A reasonable fee having a high chance of being propagated quickly (I understand that the same inputs can be sent in two txs one with higher fees)
    – Fakeer
    Commented Dec 9, 2016 at 18:31

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