If you have a legal system, then breaking my lock is unlawful intrusion, and if you take something from behind my locked door, it's theft.
Without a legal system, e.g. crypto, if you solve my puzzle, then you deserve the reward. It's just math!
Without a legal system, e.g. crypto, if you solve my puzzle, then you deserve the reward. It's just math!
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.
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.
Of course, if someone does work out the math (as they did with MD5 and sha1) it's going to be popcorn time.