Yeah... and as the person in question who found and exploited this particular bug ;P, I can definitely state that I would not feel comfortable betting the rest of my life on my ability to safely launder a giant pile of crypto back through to fiat (and then, further, keep that secret for the rest of my life, which shouldn't be downplayed).
I am much happier being able to get a bunch of clean money and then be able to give talks on the subject at conferences and get a lot of "street cred" in the tech community for my effort than spending the rest of my life wondering if there's someone from a real-world mob out there trying to hunt me down to recover the $100M I "owe them".
Yeah: I definitely agree with this, and I think it is an endemic problem to discussion of ethics in technology: we tend to focus on "but I could"--which sometimes ignores the law but even when it doesn't tends to then get bogged down arguing the exact boundaries of the law--without instead trying to judge people on whether they "should" (maybe based on the ramifications it has on other people) or "would".
I just think it is also worth noting that, even if we do accept the false dichotomy, I would not be an effective criminal... which seems to continually disappoint some people ;P. (I'm sorry to be such a let down! lol)
> If you don’t play ball in certain parts of the world, you end up in a river. The price tag is just different.
Aside from the problems of this statement being a completely vague and unspecific and extreme hypothetical, isn’t there a problem with switching from talking about incentives to talking about threats? Being threatened with death isn’t the same as being offered money, and this ground has been well covered by philosophers who point out that there are things wrong with “admitting that” as you call it. Calling it a price tag seems misleading at best. There’s further a massive problem with suggesting a person’s ethics might be based on what someone threatening them with death wants them to do, no? If the action isn’t something you are choosing to do, and isn’t something you would do if not threatened, for any amount of money, then why would you consider it your actions or part of your ethics?
Positive and negative consequences are not the same thing in ethics.
Compare “kill this person to save your son’s life” with “kill this person to earn $1 million.” They’re not equivalent, even if both might be metaphorically referred to as a price.
> If you don’t play ball in certain parts of the world, you end up in a river.
OP branched here: "it's not as if the choices were 'commit crime / get bounty'."
Any example relevant to OP's branch cannot end with the subject in a river. The very fact that you are discussing it proves we've jumped to the other branch of the conditional-- the one where the choice is exclusively between `commit crime / get bounty` (by threat of death in your example)
I am much happier being able to get a bunch of clean money and then be able to give talks on the subject at conferences and get a lot of "street cred" in the tech community for my effort than spending the rest of my life wondering if there's someone from a real-world mob out there trying to hunt me down to recover the $100M I "owe them".