Using the amounts 1,314, 13,140, and 131,400, she transferred a total of 199,728 yuan out of someone else’s account in nine transactions. That same day, she returned 1,314 yuan.
The account she took the money from was her ex-boyfriend’s Alipay account. She knew the password from the decade or so they had been together.
My view is that the key issue here is credentials. Full access to an account comes down to a line of text: the password. Whoever remembers it has control of the account.
The Funan County People’s Court in Anhui ruled at first instance that this was unjust enrichment. It ordered her to repay 199,728 yuan, plus interest for the use of the funds at an annual rate of 3%.
The judgment quoted several excerpts from their chat history. On July 7, she messaged him: “So what if I took 200,000 yuan from you?”
Four days later, she sent another message: “So what if I owe you 200,000 yuan? We didn’t sign an agreement. You won’t get a cent back.”
I think she was only half right.
Within Alipay’s system, transfers leave a record, accounts can be frozen, and court judgments can be enforced, so the claim that he couldn’t get the money back doesn’t hold up. In another system, she would be right.
On-chain transfers have no undo button. In all the years the Bitcoin network has been running, not a single confirmed transaction has ever been rolled back. Once someone else gets hold of your private key, your assets can be moved to a different address within minutes. There’s no customer service, no freezing, and no judgment that can be enforced.
Transfer records are publicly visible on the blockchain, and anyone can look them up. But finding the records won’t get the money back. No institution can move coins that have already reached someone else’s address.
On-chain, that statement holds true.
But the claim that on-chain transactions are irreversible is often treated as an ironclad rule, and it needs a qualification. USDC’s issuer can freeze addresses at the smart-contract level, and USDT has done the same. What’s truly irreversible is a network like Bitcoin, which has no issuer.
Even stablecoins with centralized issuers can be frozen.
The process of recovering 199,728 yuan—from filing the case through the hearing, judgment, and enforcement—takes months. The same amount transferred over the Bitcoin network would be confirmed in ten minutes and cost a few yuan.
The crypto industry’s answer to this problem is multisig. Split one key into three, and require any two of them to make a transfer. No one person can move the funds alone. It’s cumbersome, but what it provides is precisely what this ex-boyfriend lacked at the time: he didn’t even hold a key of his own.
There’s one other thing I’m not sure about. Her defense was that he had first transferred more than 380,000 yuan from her account on April 28.
The judgment only made a finding about the 199,728-yuan transfer on May 10; it reached no conclusion about the 380,000 yuan. I couldn’t find out how that money was transferred or whether it was dealt with in a separate case.
$BTC $USDC $ETH #币安广场 #支付宝 #私钥 #On-chain transfers
The account she took the money from was her ex-boyfriend’s Alipay account. She knew the password from the decade or so they had been together.
My view is that the key issue here is credentials. Full access to an account comes down to a line of text: the password. Whoever remembers it has control of the account.
The Funan County People’s Court in Anhui ruled at first instance that this was unjust enrichment. It ordered her to repay 199,728 yuan, plus interest for the use of the funds at an annual rate of 3%.
The judgment quoted several excerpts from their chat history. On July 7, she messaged him: “So what if I took 200,000 yuan from you?”
Four days later, she sent another message: “So what if I owe you 200,000 yuan? We didn’t sign an agreement. You won’t get a cent back.”
I think she was only half right.
Within Alipay’s system, transfers leave a record, accounts can be frozen, and court judgments can be enforced, so the claim that he couldn’t get the money back doesn’t hold up. In another system, she would be right.
On-chain transfers have no undo button. In all the years the Bitcoin network has been running, not a single confirmed transaction has ever been rolled back. Once someone else gets hold of your private key, your assets can be moved to a different address within minutes. There’s no customer service, no freezing, and no judgment that can be enforced.
Transfer records are publicly visible on the blockchain, and anyone can look them up. But finding the records won’t get the money back. No institution can move coins that have already reached someone else’s address.
On-chain, that statement holds true.
But the claim that on-chain transactions are irreversible is often treated as an ironclad rule, and it needs a qualification. USDC’s issuer can freeze addresses at the smart-contract level, and USDT has done the same. What’s truly irreversible is a network like Bitcoin, which has no issuer.
Even stablecoins with centralized issuers can be frozen.
The process of recovering 199,728 yuan—from filing the case through the hearing, judgment, and enforcement—takes months. The same amount transferred over the Bitcoin network would be confirmed in ten minutes and cost a few yuan.
The crypto industry’s answer to this problem is multisig. Split one key into three, and require any two of them to make a transfer. No one person can move the funds alone. It’s cumbersome, but what it provides is precisely what this ex-boyfriend lacked at the time: he didn’t even hold a key of his own.
There’s one other thing I’m not sure about. Her defense was that he had first transferred more than 380,000 yuan from her account on April 28.
The judgment only made a finding about the 199,728-yuan transfer on May 10; it reached no conclusion about the 380,000 yuan. I couldn’t find out how that money was transferred or whether it was dealt with in a separate case.
$BTC $USDC $ETH #币安广场 #支付宝 #私钥 #On-chain transfers