ABSTRACT
A system for ordering transactions is not a law of ownership, and the Bitcoin protocol was never meant to be the second thing. It settles the sequence in which transactions are recorded. It does not decide who, as between rival claimants, is entitled to what has moved. The distinction is not a technicality. It is the ground on which a growing body of digital-asset litigation now turns. A transfer may answer the consensus rules to the letter and still be unauthorised, mistaken, procured by fraud or made in breach of trust.
On a fair reading, ByBit Fintech Ltd v Ho Kai Xin, Fabrizio D’Aloia v Persons Unknown Category A & Others, Quoine Pte Ltd v B2C2 Ltd and Ping Fai Yuen v Fun Yung Li & Another are decisions about the legal consequences of transactions that were, in the technical sense, entirely effective. The chain records that value moved. It does not, of itself, prove mandate, consent, notice or title. D’Aloia teaches that a public history of transactions does not spare a claimant the task of proving the route by which value reached the defendant, least of all where exchanges pool their customers’ dealings and experts differ over the method of tracing. There is a consequence in this for the distribution of loss. Irreversibility takes away an administrative means of putting matters right and moves much of the cost of error onto the victim, the intermediary and the court. The weight of that cost falls unequally, for the exchange and the custodian hold the private data of attribution and can buy expert help, while the smaller claimant may be unable to turn a visible path of dealings into any relief that is worth having. The Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025 confirms that a digital thing may be the object of property rights, and leaves the questions of remedy and jurisdiction to the common law. Stablecoin regimes restore a regulated counterparty through duties as to reserve and redemption, without making an on-chain transfer immune from legal challenge.
The article proposes a modest rule of evidence. A confirmation proves that specified data were included in the canonical chain and given a place in its sequence, subject to the risk of reorganisation; the block time is no better than approximate. Whether a transfer was authorised, who owns the asset and who must answer for its loss are matters to be proved by other means. Commercial parties would do well to allocate what risk remains to whoever controls the signing, holds the customer’s information or can insure against the loss.
Tan, Albert, Final, but Not Yours: Protocol Finality, Private Law and The Allocation of Digital-Asset Loss (July 24, 2026).
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