I'm highly interested in what will happen if we can crack the crypto and move all the funds from a given wallet without any interaction or deception. It's just math, and there's no sovereign entity you're attacking or depleting. No corporate server. Seems like if you can get the numbers to match, the proceeds are yours. But we'll see.
Edit: are downvoters afraid of this idea?
I’m more curious about cases where some smart contract gives away a load of money because of some bug. There are legal cases where a contract says something stupid and courts uphold the contract and there are legal cases where a contract says something stupid and the courts instead go for the thing the contract meant to say. A funny example is that lawyers don’t like to write an equation into a contract and sometimes someone will tell them the equation that everyone agrees on for calculating interest, and they will convert it to words in the contract and the conversion will be incorrect leading to e.g. applying interest of “inflation since start of contract” cumulatively each year (leading to superexponential growth).
Couldn't you say the same about guessing a password?
In the other, you are running a hashing function on a public ledger/data.
You'd either have to leak the database to get the hashes, compromise some other system, or keep trying to talk to the server to probe for weaknesses.
With crypto it's just math that lives out in the open.
But let's say they draw a line at "making a transaction that knowingly isn't yours". What if you leak some highly valued keys and short Bitcoin?
Bitcoin are securities that have value because people say they do. Saying that BTC is just math is like saying that credit default swaps or frozen orange juice futures are just pieces of paper.
The market assigns value to things. What those things physically are is irrelevant; If there is a buyer and there is a seller, the thing is real and has value.
There's no question that theft of BTC is theft, the fundamental technology behind it isn't relevant to whether or not it's theft because people treat it as a concrete security that can be bought and sold.
That's obvious. Does US case law protect it, though? And in what ways?
> There's no question that theft of BTC is theft
If you publish keys you discover, that's not theft. And that's my point.
How does the system deal with that? There's no technical means to roll back or prove original ownership (especially if you find multiple values for the key).
The legal framework doesn't have any precedent, and if doesn't seem to me like it would protect you.
If I publish, "Hey everybody! I found Satoshi's keys! They're 0FFF...", I didn't do anything wrong.
Exactly was "owned" and taken to be considered theft? A secret?