But, these hackers walked away with $320M in ether, but is what they did actually illegal or did they just exploit a flaw in the code that allowed them to make huge profits on someone else's mistake, but wasn't actually illegal?
Does the FBI even get involved with cases like this? or is it just the wild west out there, and may the best hacker win?
In US law, theft is taking someone's property with the intent of depriving them of it permanently. It's very established in US cases that cryptocurrencies are property. The taking part is very public record. I don't think it would be hard to prove that someone intended to steal this money, given all the work involved that is publicly viewable.
It is indeed a Wild West in crypto land, but not because stealing is legal, rather because the odds of getting caught are slim, and so successful bandits keep right going.
It looks as if staying unregulated and operating "in the shadow" is more important to the crypto world than legal security. It seems as if you can't have both.
I don't disagree with you here, but in this case the asset was freely given. The giving was a mistake, but from what I understand if someone sends you something you're under no obligation to send it back to them.
Of course there's recurring theme of crypto users shouting "fuck governments, we're censorship-resistant!" on the way up, and "that was illegal, I'm calling the FBI!" on the way down.
It's the same situation. Taking money that is not yours is a punishable crime. It's that simple.
I am thinking more along the lines (made up example), you studied the trading in certain stocks and figured out a pattern where big investors were always buying huge blocks of stock XYZ right before the close, and so the price went up - if you picked up on that, and then front-ran those trades and then sold them back to the big buyer while they are buying at the close - you are not doing anything illegal - you are exploiting inefficiencies in the system (and making a pile of dough.)
Not a perfect analogy I know - Just trying to understand where this 'hack' falls on that spectrum of exploiting inefficiencies vs sticking a gun in someones face.
The fact that the "owners" of the code fixed the code before it was exploited would come down heavily on the "illegal/fraud" side of things if it were litigated. If, however, they knew about it, and there were cases of it being done, and explicitly did nothing it possibly could be argued to be intentional.
There are a few companies that specialize in tracking blockchain hackers. Not to mention law enforcement.
They could use a mixer to launder the funds but that may make it even harder to cash out because exchanges will lock your account if u deposit from an address that's remotely related to a mixer output address.
I know the crytpo folks like to repeat the "CODE IS LAW" mantra, but it's not that simple.
Imagine that that you write some complex contract which basically makes the signee to hand over everything they own to you. And you get them to sign that contract. If it had been that simple, then you could just mail out such contracts to the whole country, and go collect your new fortune.
But we know it's not that simple.
Likewise with smart contracts. A "hacker" could argue that they fulfilled some criteria, which then activated some contract - but my guess is that it would legally end up in the same way as with the above example.
Irreversible contracts with holes that you cannot dispute in a court of law.
https://levelup.gitconnected.com/how-ethereum-reversed-a-50-...
Should we expect that the core dev team will push for a fork again?
If so, what is the threshold for future scams? 100M? 10? If I get scammed of $100k don’t I deserve my money back?
Are we going to create a fork for every dispute, or are we going to just ignore all disputes?
The whole thing does not work.
Like I say, it's a consensus. Remember Ethereum Classic? Well, that network was powered by those who didn't agree with that rollback.
Isn't it better to make up your own mind than to have some 'leader' decide for everyone? Welcome to decentralization.