Comment by TrapLord_Rhodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TrapLord_Rhodo | Hacker News Reader

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Nope - It's not a robbery.

The old mantra of possession is 9/10ths of the law is and always has been false. If i have something i own it. That is the one fundamental truth. Now someone can come and try and take it back from me by force (Person, Court System, Rebels, Corporations) if they can exert more violence on 'me' than i can exert on 'Them'.

The problem with crypto is the 'keys' are what crypto is. No nationstate can come and take that away from me. They can kill/imprison/fine me, but then neither of us will have it. You would have to hack/fork the chain for that to happen (Which has happened) or find some social way around it (If i have it on a centralized exchange, if i have a hackable hard drive, found my keys on AWS, etc etc.) Additionally, with things like Monero, and tornado swap good luck trying to find them.

But it's not as simple as a robbery, like they forced their way in, or gained access to a key that its owner attempted to keep private.

If you offer a sheep for 100 lb of apples, and someone accepts and gives you the 100 lb of apples, you owe them a sheep, even if you later think that deal was a bad use of that sheep.

If you say "currency is to move and out of my bank/warehouse according to these rules, conducted by this robot", and someone finds a profitable way to transact with that robot according to those rules, you have arguably signed away those profits to that someone, and they are then entitled to keep what the rule-implementing robot gave them.

This doesn't mean "code is law" actually works as a defense in court -- there are are all kinds of reason why that promise might be unenforceable -- but you can't casually asset that this is a robbery without examining the specifics of how the transfer happened.

Even if you can prove ‘robbery’ in the courts, the courts have no ability to follow up on their threats like they would in the normal financial system. That’s my point.

Pray tell how your threat model would handle this: https://xkcd.com/538/

He said he will die for his internet money.

Willing to die and willing to endure torture are different things. Everybody breaks given enough pain.

Hahahaha. That meme is hilarious. And very true.

But again, it ignores my last point completely. Good luck trying to find the person behind the wallet.

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