[Zaak]

How are you going to merge if you have different spends on the forks you're trying to merge? It's not a matter of whether or not you care about ordering. It's a matter of one branch's spend being invalidated by the spend in the other branch.

If the answer is to stop caring about double spend, how do you anticipate that working?

[EGreg]

Yes, stop caring about double spend as long as it happens in long term forks. After some point, two different forks become two different communities. Similarly when you restrict gene flow between species which are physically separated, they often can't interbreed anymore. It's called allopatric speciation. There is evidence it happens in nature.

What you should do is have each community have its own internal currency, and then have global payments be powered by a federated system. Like the internet works.

[Zaak]

Ok, I can see not worrying about permanent forks. How do you deal with double spending in short-term forks that will soon be merged?

[EGreg]

Well, if there is a period that your transaction might get reversed, then the seller can't send you the stuff. Or, maybe you need a reputation system for buyers and sellers and so on (what eBay does) along with chargeback systems figuring out whether to let the transaction be reversed.

Typically, that period is until the next consensus. In Ripple, the consensus eventually takes place but sometimes may take up to a minute. In Bitcoin it may take 30 minutes. You are never quite sure that everyone "phoned in", but presumably if the network participants announce themselves on the network then you can know when a supermajority has "phoned in". If they haven't - you've got a fork baby.

You can also get a fork if they phone in but start a second consensus somewhere else lol.