Hacker News Reader

Comment by cvoss | Hacker News Reader

If you unlawfully or immorally gain access to information, such as my private keys, and then use that information to move money, you have absolutely committed a crime, cheated, and/or stolen from me.

If you deceive me into executing a transaction voluntarily by misrepresenting the destination (which is immoral and often illegal), you have absolutely committed a crime, cheated, and/or stolen from me.

View on HN

What laws are a North Korean subject to that they have broken? Who decides when a transaction was cheating or stealing without a central authority and enforcer?

Moral laws and natural law, and moral people in a candid world. It's the same principle by which one people accuses another, over which they have no jurisdiction, of crimes against humanity or war crimes or of violating Nature's Laws. See the US Declaration of Independence for a short treatise on this topic.

Don't crypto advocates claim it needs nothing at all from government?

What's the basis of unlawful? What contract is controlling these concepts and their adjudication?

To add to the other comments: do you really have a right to whatever it is that the bits unlocked by that key represent? Who granted you that? AFAICT, it's the systems running the blockchain that grants you that, and it's not governed by any contract outside the blockchain.

What is your theory for why you own any physical possessions? Do you only own things at the pleasure of your government which bestows you that privilege? I would think that if a coup replaced your government by force with one that did not respect rights of private ownership, you would cry "immoral", would you not? Or would you shrug and say "might makes right"?

Basically, you own what you control and can protect from leaving your control, by force, or punishment. The modern state is almost based around ownership and freedom, and takes the responsibility for a lot of that.

It may be immoral (not necessarily a crime, mind you) if someone deceives you, but so is using Bitcoin. You're burning the Amazon, while serving as a cash convertor for criminals. Just for personal gains.

I'm sorry, on the Blockchain we don't recognize legacy concepts like dead-tree nation state laws or ancient superstitions purporting to define morality. The future is all about registering ownership information in digital ledgers.

If you wanted to retain control of your keys, you should have encoded them in a secure, nonfungible image of monkey on the Ethereum Blockchain. That way, everyone would know those keys belonged to you.

What NK hackers are alleged to have done here is fraud, something that the US head of state has been convicted of, by courts in his own country. NK on the other hand, has not been tried nor convicted.

What possible legitimacy does the US even have to mark others as "thieves"?

Theft is first a moral concept, and only secondly a legal one, so there is no need to invoke the legitimacy of nation states' authority to have a meaningful discussion about theft.

Theft is a moral concept, but the legitimacy of a justice department to comment on it rests on its record of enforcing the legal limits consistently in its own remit. That is openly not the case anymore, voiding the legitimacy it may otherwise have held.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com