[farseer]

Is it fair game and legal to break into a wallet via cryptographic means alone? I mean without hacking someone's computer/storage to steal the private key that is.

I understand this is not realistic right now, but might be if someone has discovered new math or physics for example.

[carterschonwald]

Since the only proof of owner ship is private key material. Yes. And in fact this has been done and demonstrated for certain ethereum or other systems.

edit: certain elliptical curve crypto systems use randomness as part of the encipherment process. If two uses of the same key have low quality randomness/no randomness, solving for the private key material essentially becomes a slightly tedious high school algebra math problem.

heres a paper from last year where they did such an analysis, found some weak keys, and then saw that those wallets had already been hacked/drained! (possibly by someone who did similar work, for profit rather than science) https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/023

[Cthulhu_]

Theoretically it could probably be labeled as hacking and / or theft in a court of law. Practically, you'd never find out who did it unless they admitted to it, happen to live in the same country, etc etc etc.

I think the saying "it's only a crime if you get caught" is applicable in this case.

That said, you can get charged with tax evasion if you have crypto without reporting it. If they find out that is. I have some crypto stashed on an exchange, so I'm expecting them to report to my tax office at some point.