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Comment by mdavis6890 | Hacker News Reader

It's important to realize that attribution - knowing which human got which money when - is actually very important in many contexts, particularly when a lot of money is involved. This allows for an un-do button in the case of mistakes, fraud, etc. If I'm wiring my down payment for a house for $200k, it's nice to know that if I fat-finger the receiving account I can get the money back. How would you feel paying your down-payment in cash or BTC? How about when Citi accidentally paid an extra $900M (or something like that). Normally they'd be able to get all the money back (actually in that case they couldn't, but that was a weird anomaly).

I'm all for privacy, anonymity, etc - which is one of the reasons I'm very excited about crypto - but you always have to look at things from multiple angles.

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Attribution is important but you don't need the government to be able to do it without your authorization. You can very well have private unattributable transactions that you decide to disclose to the authorities only if you need and want to.

If you send your coins from wallet A to wallet B with CoinJoin, it's not possible for a third party to identify this transaction, but you can disclose the seed of wallet A and sign a transaction from wallet B thus proving ownership of both.

AFAICS none of your points addresses the problem posed by your parent commentor: someone accidentally sent a lot of money to the wrong account/wallet and wants it back, even if the receiver is uncooperative.

I'm not sure we understood the parent comment the same way but you're right, you can't get your money back if sent to someone uncooperative. However, you can call the authorities and prove that you sent funds to that person and let them recover it if possible. I only addressed the question of attribution.

In the Citi case though it could have been paid in BTC and the result would be the same. The law decided then and the law would decide in bitcoin. Yes the ability for the court to force the return(or not) would depend in some part on the party being willing to do it, but ultimately if they are going to abide by the law it would happen regardless of the medium used.

Voluntary attribution is a solved problem in cryptography, so you can stay private if everything goes well and prove you are the sender or receiver for a given transaction if you need it reversed.

I believe the $900M was merely paid earlier than it needed to be, but was still owed, so why the transaction wasn't reversed.

Yes, but still normally this mistake would be unwound. The recipients would just send the money back, or a court would tell them to send it back, even though the money was owed. But there were a number of confounding factors - for example that the money wasn't owed by Citi - it was owed by someone else and Citi was just paying on their behalf.

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