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Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

Nothing was "unwound." The government found the criminals' private key, which they were unwisely storing in an online account. That allowed the government to make a new transaction, moving the funds wherever they liked. From the link in the article:

> special agents obtained access to files within an online account controlled by Lichtenstein. Those files contained the private keys required to access the digital wallet that directly received the funds stolen from Bitfinex

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-arrested-alleged-conspira...

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> Nothing was "unwound." The government found the criminals' private key, which they were unwisely storing in an online account. That allowed the government to make a new transaction, moving the funds wherever they liked.

This is how "unwinding" works in almost all payment systems: Creating a second transaction to (partially or fully) offset the effects of the original one.

Yes, this is how normal everyday commerce works. My employer transfers some USD into my bank account. I then transfer some of those USD to my landlord's bank account. This is in no sense a reversal of an earlier transaction or an indication that an earlier transaction was "not finalized."

Fine, but the government has no special power over Bitcoin in this regard. If they hadn't found the key, they wouldn't have been able to issue that transaction, and any common thief who found the key could have done what they did.

The relevant meta-point here is that the government is uniquely positioned to come into possession of most keys that it wants (or more indirectly, render them useless by including them on sanction/embargo lists).

Yes. In a narrow technological definition of "final", you're right. However, not in the societal or legal sense.

The definition of finality used by you and the author of the piece is so vague and all-encompassing as to be meaningless. There isn't really anything to debate other than semantics.

You could just as easily say that cash payments aren't final because you could lose your wallet after you put the cash in it, but using the example of Bitcoin and the federal government is going to get more clicks.

> There isn't really anything to debate other than semantics.

Wasn't the point that a certain amount of ambiguity around finality is the usual (and natural) state of payment systems?

Yeah, So the federal government unwound the transaction whether they wanted it unwound or not. Which is in fact how it works in banking institutions too. A reverse of the transaction is issued that in effect unwinds it. In the real world sense which is the context of the article the transaction has been unwound or reversed.

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