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by tsimionescu 1612 days ago
The idea is that for the Bitcoin network "knowing the private key" is 1:1 entriely equivale to "being the legitimate owner of the wallet". Onve someone has found out the private key of a wallet, they have the exact same access to that wallet as anyone else who knows the private key.

This is different from finding out someone's password or even password + MFA on a centralized service, say Gmail. There, Google and/or the court systems step in, ascertain the legitimate owner, reset the credentials to the account, and give only the legitimate owner access.

There is no way to do this in Bitcoin, by design. Even if the US Supreme Court decided that you are the only legitimate owner of this wallet, there would be no way to prevent someone else who knows the private key from moving "your" Bitcoin. Of course, they could be punished for this, in principle, but it would be impossible to prevent it from happening.