[andrewfong]

> If I buy some socks on Amazon with my credit card info intended only for buying those socks and a hacker steals this info and then uses it to buy a plasma TV at Best Buy, this exactly meets the definition of double spending, and this is exactly what credit card thieves do (and what you can't do with bitcoins.)

That's not double spending. The same "dollar" isn't being spent twice. Credit card theft basically means using someone else's credentials (in this case, a credit card number) to purchase goods. If you get the private key for someone's wallet, you can do the same thing (although it should, in theory, be much harder to do this since there's never any need to share your private key, unlike with credit card numbers).

[drcode]

Agreed, the comparison I made to double spending wasn't very good.