If you go by the whole “code is law” approach talked about by some crypto people, then I guess it wouldn’t be theft?

The blockchain has no concept of people/entities owning things, in that universe the ownership of an address is simply having its private key.

(Of course in the real meat-world we have courts, non-code-contracts, and rule of law. It would probably be criminal, in the same way finding a weakness in e.g PayPal and transferring peoples money is criminal)

I don't know if "code is law" has to be invoked here. Isn't that a HN-specific strawman argument?

Anyways, of course you can take those coins as when you're running Bitcoin you're strictly speaking not signing a TOS and nobody ever owned those coins.

What people keep private are signing keys for a transaction output. But if you found the key independently, they should be yours too.

Of course it depends on jurisdiction, but it would be really interesting to see what would happen if someone got their hands on keys of some commercial organizations’ wallet and then publicly announced (according to the premise that they are the rightful owner). E.g by using a PRNG-weakness in some HSM or something, i.e no entry into their networks etc.

My guess is that the court would recognize the first owner as the “real” owner, especially if they can show that they controlled the address up until some point.

In a similar vain condictio indebiti is a principle in maybe jurisdictions, where a receiver of a wrongful payment is required to return it. Even if the payment is made with crypto, the principle would probably stand if it’s practical to enforce.

I think my point is that Bitcoin isn’t different (in some aspects) compared to other asset.

If a company accidentally sent a bundle of cash via registered mail to the wrong person, the recipient (if known) would probably have to return that cash after a court ruling.

If Coinbase made an erroneous transfer of BTC to one of their customers (whose identities they know), the recipient would probably have to return the bitcoins after a court ruling.

If the recipient of the mailed cash is unknown, or the person associated with the receiving wallet is unknown, then the court could obviously do nothing. But that inability is a function of the knowledge about the parties involved, not of the underlying technologies.

Bitcoin obviously makes it much easier to be unknown to the judicial system. But in my view, for it to be completely not-theft, the recipient should be able to announce publicly what he has done without fear of repercussions.

Similar to how e.g digging up historical artifacts in some jurisdictions is a legal way to gain ownership of something that previously had a different owner.

yeah but re-generating a private key as a secondary owner isn't akin to any ownership concept in the real world and so I doubt that the law already has a playbook on how to handle such a situation.

Re-generating a private key for outputs that have spendable Bitcoins isn't like sending letters to the wrong person.

It’s theft, but I suppose you could claim it was really your private key the whole time. Would the other person be able to prove it was theirs?

1. isn't bitcoin essentially worth $0 at that point? the technology is provably not safe and everyone will (should?) dump. getting it back is pointless. If I drag it out for a week or two it might not even make it to small claims.

2. having a court force someone to give bitcoin to someone else because they "don't own it" is also against what bitcoin stands for: decentralized. the blockchain decides who owns the bitcoin. regardless of how it got there. if some entity decides who should own what amount of bitcoin then the blockchain becomes irrelevant.

3. the blockchain is not irrelevant and is not under anyone's control (is it?). how can a court enforce bitcoin ownership transfer? if I burn the private key out of spite then good luck. you're not made whole, I don't have access to said bitcoin. now what? should I go to jail? what does that solve? it only tells the next guy to not brag about finding private keys left and right.

They might depending on how they loaded the money into said wallet. Considering most $ to bitcoin exchanges seem to log everything they likely would be a good way to prove that it is [your] $. Of course that assumes [you] haven't put it through anything like a tumbler.

They probably could by transactions linked to the public key that matches the private key and can be verified by law enforcement and witnesses that know the actual owner.

If you guess someone’s bank details and steal their money, in many jurisdictions the account owner would have some recourse against the bank and is likely to be made whole (not an easy or enjoyable process I’ll admit) - so I guess that’s one key difference.

If you steal someone's BTC coins in this way - don't expect to be able to talk about it publicly.

A judge might easily make a ruling that you "stole" the money. Don't expect the legal system to accept the notion that crypto is outside their jurisdiction, nor expect them to appreciate your complex tech arguments about why it's not really stealing.

Yeah, it's the bank you would be stealing from, through fraud (impersonation, I guess). But Bitcoin is decentralized, so you wouldn't be stealing from anyone?

You're still stealing from someone, but it's harder for them to catch you.

No. You're not stealing from anyone. It's decentralized and bits have no owner. If you say 'hey, here is my Bitcoin transaction' and others accept, and you just had luck to find a valid address, it is not the same as stealing. Bitcoin has no value.

That isn't true, although you might like the philosophical debate around that, a judge is still going to make you pay the person back and/or give you a prison sentence if it's proven that you are the original owner of the keys. He's going to laugh at your digital philosophy as he slams his hammer down upon judgement.

Not if the bank scenario holds. There is no legal persona associated with bitcoin nor the block chain. There's also no money there. Someone else took it already.

Why would it be harder? There’s a ledger of your transactions available for analysis.

In a decentralized system, 'theft' is only a moral construct, not a legal one. And who will enforce any repercussions?

Wait, do you also think international companies are above the law?

States very much care what's going on within its borders, if its via services hosted outside them or not. And in some cases states will even care about what their citizens do outside their borders. For example, engaging in child sex tourism can have legal consequences even if the actual abuse happens in a foreign country.

Decentralization isn't magic. States will enact and enforce laws within their borders and they will have more tangible effects than any so-called "smart" contract.

I don't see how that relates to my statement.

In the trustless and decentralized system of Bitcoin (and other blockchain implementations), there is no concept of theft. If you misplace your private key you're on your own. There's no central authority to turn to. Similar if someone cracks your private key. That's the entire idea of the technology.

If you use bitcoin for money laundering, you're not gonna get in trouble with any bitcoin nodes. What a nation state will do if they find out is however a very different topic.

There's no concept of theft in the physical material of gold either.

I am interested on the simple technical answer for this. Is it possible to simply take funds out if you stmble across or happen to randomly generate a valid private key?

So if I were developing such a website as posted here ... I would obviously put an automated code that transfers any funds to my own wallet (if there is a non zero wallet discovered when rendering a page on the fly). Effectively just using the millions of global user's clicks as random seed spread over long time :)

you can do that now, and without a website, obviously. You probably need to do it more than trillions of years, but go ahead. You might be lucky (though it's more likely that you crash in a plane, or, for that matter, that a plane crashes on your house, in the meantime).

but that's the point of this website. all the computation is done on the thousands of clients generating these keys. its only a matter of time (and some luck) until a green wallet is hit. if the site owner is malicious then it will actually empty the wallet in the background and show it red in the front.

The problem would be getting the money out without revealing your identity

OTC exchanger in Colombia, wear a custome in case there's cameras.

If you end up stealing from the mob or well known exchanges it's a problem but for everyone else does it really make any difference?

How do they prove they were the previous owner and that it wasn't a legit transaction?

Next we’ll see a “Every checking account” website or “Every Social Security Number”

I would 100% yes by traditional definitions of theft. Who knows by today's standards?