Quote from: RodeoX on April 09, 2014, 07:45:15 PM

I think of a double spend as a spend with confirmation followed by another spend of the same balance.

Which is what happened in March, 2013. If you were using the v0.8 client there was a transaction that had more than six confirmations but later the fork which pre-v0.8 clients were mining surpassed the one the v0.8 were using and that transaction became invalid. What happened was a user noticed the fork, created a new transaction that spent the same funds, used a custom client that repeatedly broadcast the double spend attempt and eventually that new transaction got included in the pre-v0.8 blockchain fork.

So yes, a double spend of a transaction that had six or more confirmations on what was at the time the longest chain is something that has occurred.

The gist of the problem was that miners starting up with the v0.7 client had an empty memory pool and thus no knowledge of the transactions that had already confirmed in the blockchain fork mined by the v0.8 clients. So then it simply is a race -- whichever transaction (of the two that were spending the same coin) that reached those miners first is the one that was being hashed. For that specific weakness, there are solutions that had been discussed but not implemented as far as I know. For instance, when the miner is shut down the unconfirmed transactions in the memory pool could be written to the filesystem and then those transactions get loaded first when the miner starts back up. That would likely have made the result of that March 2013 fork be that no double spends had occurred.