Steal, copy, exfiltrate, obtain - that's not the point.

The point is that hacking, when transitive, involves manipulating an object. It is not a synonym for "copy". When people use it like that, it's typically to hide the fact that their (human or technical) systems were so bad that somebody managed to copy data they should not have. "They hacked keys!!11!" - No, something or somebody gave them keys, but you want us to believe that it required incredible skills.

> Without a legal system, e.g. crypto, if you solve my puzzle, then you deserve the reward. It's just math!

My fear keeping me from getting into the... offensive crypto space has been that the original owners of the wallets won't see it that way, and an imperfect opsec will leave me as one of the 70% of murders that don't get solved in the US.

Someone with millions to billions in crypto has a decent chance of being diversified, and use to backfilling the lack of access to the state's monopoly on violence with some of their own.

I don't think any math was done. They sneaked a copy of the answer.

Of course, if someone does work out the math (as they did with MD5 and sha1) it's going to be popcorn time.

I guess I'm old, but "hacked" to me typically involves trickery in manipulating the object itself, not just exfiltrating it. You hack a system to copy data, you don't "hack data". If you say you hacked keys, I expect you manipulated those keys with some crypto wizardry, but in this case it just means somebody somehow obtained them somehow.

I like to distinguish attacks where money was stolen using stolen credentials from those that occured simply by manipulating smart contracts. Some crypto enthusiasts would consider the second type of attack to be legitimate activity rather than theft, so long as the attacker stayed within the letter of the 'law' as expressed on chain.

I'm not sure I agree. I mean secrets can be stolen. Apparently pirating music or movies is theft and so on.

We've often seen the naritive of Big company stealing ideas etc from smaller companies.

So stealing can extend beyond simple physical property, and could acceptably encompass IP as well.

hacking a system and stealing a key (copying) is a lot less interesting than hacking a key by exploiting some cryptographic weakness