Soo what happens if you're incredibly lucky and stumble across the private key for an active wallet?
If you transfer the funds out, isn't that just theft? Is "guessing" a private key any different from guessing someone's bank details?
If you transfer the funds out, isn't that just theft? Is "guessing" a private key any different from guessing someone's bank details?
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)
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.
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.
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.
Re-generating a private key for outputs that have spendable Bitcoins isn't like sending letters to the wrong person.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
How do they prove they were the previous owner and that it wasn't a legit transaction?