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Comment by kondro | Hacker News Reader

Im curious. Is this actually illegal? Is there any requirement on how valid crypto currency is created?

I understand the network could implement a fix and prevent future transactions or even roll back old ones if there's enough desire, that's what democracies are about right?

But was there anything illegal about creating and then trading them? A rollback would hurt the exchanges, but if they didn't already have something in their T&Cs about currencies needing to be created legitimately (and what legitimately actually means), then is it anything other than morally wrong?

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I recently spoke at an event where we talked about the crossover of cryptocurrency and the law with a bunch of attorneys present. Many attorneys spoke up during the Q and A to remind everyone that at the end of the day the legality of anything will be decided by either a jury or a judge. It's going to come down to the arguments both sides make, and I think any defense would have a hard time explaining how what they did was legal in the face of the CFAA. Analogies will be drawn to hacking of other systems, banks, etc. How people feel about it culturally will also affect the outcome.

One important distinction to make is that it really is also going to depend on the jurisdiction of those involved. Is the defendant in the US or somewhere else? Who is prosecuting and what are the charges?

Is there a recording of this discussion available online?

Unfortunately only a snippet that does not include the back and forth with the audience. https://twitter.com/amyywan/status/829614419671871488

I think if you explained this in layman's terms to "a bloke down the pub", he'd consider it theft. The law generally feels the same way. (IANAL.)

Not the same, but it reminded me of years ago, I had £50 deposited in to my account, by mistake, a couple of months running. I asked my girlfriend's dad - who actually was AL (WAL?) - if I could keep it. He said it would be like someone parking their car on my driveway and leaving the keys in the ignition. Inconvenient, yeah, and I don't want it there - but it doesn't make the car mine.

Depends on a country. In Poland, if a company sends you money, once you spend it, they have no right to get it back. The reasoning being that you have a right to assume companies know what they are doing.

If a private person sends you money, you have to give it back.

This seems very surprising to me. And it also seems criminally exploitable.

So if a bank in Poland sends you a million dollars by mistake, is it yours?

What would happen if someone stole it and transferred it to your account, does that make you a criminal?

And even more interestingly, if a malicious bank programmer (who's in league with you) introduced a bug on purpose (let's suppose we cannot prove the intent here, it's very difficult) and the bank mistakenly deposits you the money, do you have a duty to return it?

I don't know about Poland, but in Austria there is a similar law (IANAL but my lawyer friend told me about it), and banks are excepted from it. So if a company sends you money by mistake you can spend it and don't have to give it back after that, but if a bank makes a mistake in your favour, you have to return it in any case. Happened to my lawyer friend's mother.

I'm under the impression that the general philosophy of cryptocurrencies is that the code is the law. You can do anything that the code will allow you to do, because it's designed so that you can trust the system and not people. It's a small step to say that it's also not the programmers' intent that matters, but the code itself, because it's the code that matters, not people.

(I'm not sure how this relates to courts of law.)

This isn't true, given how frequently hard forks happen in crypto. This means that the code said one thing, but the community decided that it was the wrong thing and everyone moved on to the new fork.

This could probably be spun as a violation of the cfaa. IANAL, but the practical interpretation of that seems to be "don't do bad stuff using a computer", kind of like mail fraud but worse.

> This could probably be spun as a violation of the CFAA

I'm not sure there's much that couldn't

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