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by webXL
549 days ago
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A very interesting philosophical and moral can of worms you just opened there. Bitcoin is governed by the protocol, so if the protocol permits anyone who can sign a valid transaction involving a given UTXO to another address, then it technically isn't a "crime". Morally I'm not sure I'd be able to sleep well at night if I unilaterally took what I didn't exchange value for. As for the forgotten key case, I think the only way to prove you had the key at some point would need to involve the sender vouching for you and cryptographically proving they were the sender. |
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Legally, the situation is the same: legal ownership is not in any way tied to the mechanism of how some system or another keeps track of ownership. Your BTC is yours via a contract, not because the BTC network says so. Of course, proving to a judge that someone else stole your BTC may be extremely hard, if not impossible.
Saying "if the protocol permits anyone who can sign a valid transaction involving a given UTXO to another address, then it technically isn't a "crime"" is like saying "traditional banking is governed by a banker checking your identity, so if someone can convince the banker they are you, then it technically isn't a "crime"".
The only thing that wouldn't be considered a crime, in both cases, is the system allowing the transaction to happen. That is, it's not a crime for the bank teller to give your money to someone else if they were legitimately fooled; and it's not a crime for the Bitcoin miners to give your money to someone else if that someone else impersonated your private key. But the person who fooled the bank teller /the miners is definitely committing a crime.