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New transactions are selected randomly to be verified. So in case the attackers transaction is still not confirmed there is a chance to outspend him by having the private keys. I find this useful in understanding the confirmation/consensus mechanism. https://forum.iota.org/t/iota-consensus-masterclass/1193

I am not sure about 8 times efficiency and 10% argument. The founder said that in his interview yesterday. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GwhJQ67zxbg I just found this article about ternary and as you said storage needs to be in ternary too. The main reason seems to be it is close to the value of “e” https://www.techopedia.com/why-not-ternary-computers/2/32427

For the double spend to occur, you would need access to the seed ( private key) which the victims had and are trying to outrun the attacker in the case you were describing.

Their argument for using ternary is that it is 8 times more efficient than binary and it is very important for iot devices which need to be have low energy consumption and a long life. Whereas the conversation from ternary to binary would add only a 10 % additional usage.

They are trying to push the ternary to see if adoption can take off. All it needs is a few thousand logic gates on any traditional chip.if it doesn’t get adopted,they said they can always go back to binary.

Just to be clear, for the vulnerabilities DCI found to be exploited, the victim has to practically give away their private key at which point the descibed attack is moot.

IOTAs developer CFB has used this kind of copy protection for hen he developed NXT and his entire history is littered with arguing for putting a copy protection in place. His argument for putting that in place is any legitimate developer would review the code for vulnerabilities and kinks b fore implementation and only those trying to plagiarize the work would literally copy paste the code. That seems a rational argument to me and I am not entirely sure if the copy protection in IOTA’s case is deliberate or not but they say it is and his historical work seems to be in line with that