Just curious. Legally speaking. If someone was to "guess" the private key to an account with hundreds or thousands of bitcoin, could they legally move the bitcoin and take control of it? Or is it just as much an act of theft as guessing someone's car door code and driving off with the car? I can't imagine there is any legal precedent for such a thing.
Legally stealing you still committed theft. Just because you have the technical ability to pick a lock doesn't give you the right to enter a room and take someone else's stuff. And there is a lot of legal precedent that hacking weak passwords is still hacking (also an illegal act even if you don't steal anything) and the theft of digital goods is still theft.
Practically speaking, if you actually managed to get hundreds of thousands of bitcoin, you're going to have someone very interested in getting it back. The legal argument might not even concern you if the previous holder of those bitcoins thinks that most likely way to recover their money by hiring thugs to hurt you.
> Legally stealing you still committed theft. Just because you have the technical ability to pick a lock doesn't give you the right to enter a room and take someone else's stuff. And there is a lot of legal precedent that hacking weak passwords is still hacking (also an illegal act even if you don't steal anything) and the theft of digital goods is still theft.
No, it's not so clear cut. Using a hacked password is illegal because it's unauthorized access to a computer[1]. The hacked passwords themselves are not illegal, otherwise sites like haveibeenpwned couldn't operate. In the BTC/crypto scenario, there's no unauthorized access occurring.
More than that, there's no link between a BTC address and a real identity. If I log into your bank account with a hacked password and get caught, law enforcement can quickly determine that I was trying to access something I didn't own because the bank has many details on the identity of the account owner. If I use a guessed private key to transfer BTC out of your wallet, how would you dispute my claim that I was the original owner of the wallet? Where's the proof that your private key wasn't the guessed copy?
> Practically speaking, if you actually managed to get hundreds of thousands of bitcoin, you're going to have someone very interested in getting it back. The legal argument might not even concern you if the previous holder of those bitcoins thinks that most likely way to recover their money by hiring thugs to hurt you.
lol This is just pure fantasy. People haven't even gotten their coins back from Mark Karpelès[2], and he's a very visible and public figure. If an anonymous person randomly generated a private key and moved coins, nobody's going to be sending thugs after them.
