Topic: Another take at intellectual property - what about bitcoin private keys? - page 3. (Read 7054 times)

Holding a knife to someone's throat would already be a violation of the NAP, I presume. Likewise entering someone's property.

So either switch yours off, or disconnect it (from me), or secure it.  But even still, let's separate the hacker who gains access to your computer, from the criminal mastermind, who eventually obtains your bitcoin keys and the associated bitcoins. What is your argument now to regain the bitcoins?  Let me quote nybble41's post (boldface mine):

Though I must add that the contracts argument, though admirable, couldn't ever be effective - it's not working in today's regulated world, never mind a libertarian world. How could you ever enforce that all internet users the world over have a contract with ISP's, upstream providers, and backbone providers, which prohibits hacking - and that such contracts will all be enforced? And then, suppose someone hacks the ISP and gains "illegitimate" access to the internet? Back to square one. I'm sure nybble41 was aware of this though and was merely pointing out the futility of relying on contracts to eliminate hacking.

Whaaaa?

If I hold a knife to your mother's throat and instruct her to do something she manifestly knows how to do - proven by the fact of your existence - does that make her refusal to acquiesce to my raping her a violation of the NAP?

If I have a fence around my yard and you climb it, does that make my kicking you off my lawn a violation of the NAP?

Refusing trespass is not a violation of the NAP, nor is defending oneself. I'm not refusing you permission to interact freely with your computer. I'm refusing you permission to interact freely with mine.

The 'victim' would have to establish that the bitcoins were his. Since both parties have the private key, there is no way to establish that, unless you institute a single central incorruptible authoritative registry of bitcoin keys and their owners.

I'm not so sure. Suppose I create an mp3 and I sell copies in order to buy bread. If you sell it, then that would constitute a fraudulent source of funds for you. Of course, you could just give away copies for free. But then, someone could steal my bitcoins and give them away for free too, in which case the second receiver would be free to do as he pleases.

If the data is copied, the 'owner' still has the original, therefore there is no theft - nothing has been lost. The rest, executing instructions and mathematical functions on a computer, is not a violation of NAP. See this post below from the thread I cited before; it's the second post in that thread and is quite representative of many who contributed there (boldface mine):



nybble41 has already answered this above - I cannot instruct your computer to do anything it is not already programmed to do. Refusing me permission to interact freely with my computer would be a violation of the NAP.

nybble41 replied to this much better than me.

The thread I quoted seems to suggest otherwise. But I accept your statement. This is precisely why I started this thread talking about anti-IPR - I wanted to avoid generalizing to libertarianism and risk getting it wrong.

Can you explain a bit more? It would be great if someone holdings NghtRppr's (of the quote above) views would contribute here because I really feel that copying and using an mp3 is very similar to copying and using a bitcoin private key. Or, alternatively, you'd need an arbitrary law like "numbers that make up an mp3 are not protected, but numbers that make up a BPK are protected".

You seem to be arguing against valuing Bitcoins themselves, not just against considering a loss of them a theft. Yes, Bitcoins are not even a digital "thing", they are defined only by transactions. They are an abstraction of value, just like fiat currency.

If a network error transfers the coins away, then those coins have not been "stolen". Stolen coins are transferred away by someone entering a transaction using a private key they acquired through illicit means, just as if someone somehow acquired your login credentials to your bank and sent all your digital fiat currency to another account with another bank.

But if someone makes a transaction from a private key that you control to one you do not control, you have lost the value of the Bitcoins represented by that transaction. Damages are always denominated in value, not in contracts or objects. Since you have lost value, it doesn't matter what currency that value is denominated in. I could run a quick conversion and say "He stole 4 grams of gold worth of Bitcoins!" and the value lost would still be the same.

Whenever something is stolen, it's the value, and not the Bitcoins, or the gold or the Dollars, or even the TV or car, that has been stolen, and that needs to be returned. Now, ideally, that value is returned in the same manner in which it was taken, but that's not often the case. If your car gets stolen, the insurance agency doesn't send you a new car. They send you a check for the value of the car.

No, with traditional fiat currencies what is stolen is the physical notes, or contractual claims to the physical notes. The bank balance you refer to is a contractual claim against the bank for a specific amount of fiat currency. If someone shows up at a bank claiming to be you, and withdraws currency from your account or transfers it to a different account, they are committing fraud against the bank. (This is important: the fraud is against the bank, not you, though your contract with the bank may attempt to make you responsible for it.) They are claiming that the bank has an obligation which it does not, in fact, have. Their contract is with you, not the one impersonating you. Using fraudulent claims to trick the bank into giving you currency they do not owe you is theft; you're taking currency which still legitimately belongs to the bank. With bitcoins, there is no property and no contract, only a consensus-based accounting protocol.

What is stolen is always property, not "the monetary value it represents". The value of the property is only relevant when determining damages--but for there to be damages, property must first have been stolen.

Fiat currency is based on essentially the exact same concepts. Moreso the fiat currency residing in a bank balance. Both are digital information that has monetary value by consensus. Either way, if I transfer that digital information from one place to another without your consent, I have stolen from you, whether that theft is denominated in dollars or in Bitcoins. What's been stolen is not the information, but the monetary value it represents.

This argument, and several others similar to it, are predicated on the idea that bitcoins (a) exist, and (b) are property. Bitcoins, per se, do not exist. They are not physical objects you could stake a claim to, or even contracts granting you a claim to property, like your contract with your bank.

What does exist are entries in a distributed database in the form of "A transaction signed with the private key matching this address can transfer exactly X bitcoins to another address of their choice." However, this database exists only by consensus. There is no contract. If the other participants in the bitcoin system fail to recognize your signed transactions, or rewrite the ledger such that the balance is associated with some other key you don't control, that is just too bad for you.

You are completely reliant on others choosing to follow the established bitcoin protocol--and the protocol does not have any regard for ownership in the sense you refer to, only possession of the associated private keys. Use of a key to sign a transaction is only proof of possession, which is true (and thus not fraud), however you came by the key. Any claim you might make against someone misusing your private key would have to be based on the principle that acquiring the key in the first place involved a violation of your rights to the physical property in which the key was stored.

Exactly the same as if you walk into my bank with a false beard and pretend to be me and transfer funds into your bank account. You have deprived me of a stored sum of wealth without my permission.

And Casacius is right, most of the libertarians I converse with, even the more strident ones are still in favor of IP laws. Personally, I think they haven't thought the non-aggression principle through sufficiently but there you go. Personally, I'm not completely against the existence of such laws but think that the waters have been muddied way too much by those who claim to represent the content producers.

I think I see what you are trying to get at but I think you need to think about things a little more deeply because you're conflating two different but not dissimilar concepts..

i read the title of this thread and thought about knocking my head against a brick wall wondering why anyone would use interlectual property laws when they never invented the blockchain or the white paper concept of bitcoin.

unless you personally thought up and invented the blockchain/private key we today call bitcoin.. its not your intellectual property. you just have a free licence to use it.

ok now thats covered the legalities in simple terms. lets get to the use of bitcoin technology and how we can protect what we have.

you cannot claim intellectual property privileges/rights of bitcoin as its not your intellect.. your brain fart didnt make bitcoin (as a whole) exist. The bitcoin technology belongs to the guys that made the white paper about the bitcoin concept and they have allowed free user licence along the same terms of open source linux

however you can claim ownership of assets manufactured from someone elses intellectual property.

EG satoshi owns a gold mine(bitcoin code) and allows anyone in the world to mine on his land(blockchain).. and they can keep what they find. (hope u understand the analogy). You dont own the land. But you do own the gold you get and you have a licence to access the land.

your private key is your licence and just like your driving licence, it's an identification to give you access to the land, an identification to go to the bank to cash in or out your gold.

your private key is not deemed as your intellectual property, your private key is your 'identity' and your coins are your asset.

so if looking for legal protection, identity theft and asset/property theft are what you should be looking into.. not intellectual property but standard property..

if i was to for instance, guess your password to your FIAT online bank account and empty your savings. you would not be trying to get me arrested for intellectual property theft. it would be identity theft and theft of assets.

same goes for hacking your forum username and requesting coins from strangers on here to scam them.. you wont try getting me arrested for intellectual property theft because you own your username. you would get me arrested for identity theft and fraud.

same goes for cloning your driving licence and walking into your bank asking(in your name) to empty out the gold in your safety deposit box.

yes you have in your wallet your driving licence and you deem it as yours.. but its not your INTELLECTUAL property.. it belongs to the DMV in the US or the DVLA in the UK. that ID card is not INTELLECTUALLY yours, but it is your property in terms of goods/products/property/bricks and mortar.

so drop the topic about intellectual property, as its meaningless as a legal bitcoin protection. (unless your satoshi)

A computer is physical property. Hacking is trespassing on that physical property.

Or one can look at it another way. If I transfer Bitcoins from an address you control to an address I control, without your consent, I have stolen from you. You no longer have control of those Bitcoins. You have lost something, suffered damages. Once loss - damages - have been established, any libertarian anywhere will support your retrieval of that loss. No IP laws are needed.

IP laws protect from "loss" of something that cannot be lost: a copy of some data or other. Bitcoins are not just data, they are data which is verifiably under only one person's control at a time. They hold monetary value. The ones and zeroes which make up your bank account information are likewise data which is verifiably under your control, and if I transfer the balance from an account you control to an account I control, without your consent, I have likewise stolen from you. Bitcoins are no different than an electronic bank account balance.

Ok, but then the situation becomes that you cannot have IP laws for bitcoin because you don't allow IP laws.
Then if bitcoin is important enough to society we will invent some law that will address cryptocurreny directly.
For one, information needs a physical medium to be contained and you can make the private key more physical so that normal property laws apply.
If you want to stay within the digital domain then you could define a virtual container and you could say that everything inside the container is your property.

I think we are at the beginning of a new time where law will have to consider virtual property besides real property and intelectual property.
All three call for a different approach.

First, you might need to define mp3 fraud.  I have no idea what that means.


Changing credit card to Bitcoin makes sense:  Bitcoin fraud is a wide-ranging term for theft and fraud committed using Bitcoin or any related mechanism as a fraudulent source of funds in a transaction. The purpose may be to obtain goods without paying, or to obtain unauthorized funds from an account.    (Of course, since Bitcoin is also a unit of account, not just a payment method, the term "Bitcoin fraud" might properly be defined to also include any kind of fraud that involves attempts to take someone's Bitcoins.)

If I try to say: MP3 fraud is a wide-ranging term for theft and fraud committed using an MP3 file or any similar audio file as a fraudulent source of funds in a transaction. The purpose may be to obtain goods without paying, or to obtain unauthorized funds from an account.   ... the statement no longer makes sense.

(a) Yes. (b) Me too (agreed).

Yes, I agree.

I can agree with all this, except the very last sentence. See this quote from the thread about legal research I cited in OP (which, however, refers to our current world, not the imaginary anti-IPR world) (emphasis original):
If you think bitcoin fraud is similar to credit card fraud, then why couldn't I claim the same thing for mp3 fraud? However, since you are in favor of IP, you're probably the wrong person to ask.


There is property in this society. Just not intellectual property.

Aah, interesting.

But you'll have to ask yourself what use there would be for bitcoin in a society without property.
Why would anyone even produce food if it got taken away because they didn't own it?
Such a society simply cannot exist.

I don't think libertarian necessarily means anti IP.  A brief Google search leads me to believe opinions on this are all over the map.  I believe in IP (just not as presently implemented in the US, particularly am not a fan of the status quo patent system).

I also think private keys have nothing to do with IP.  A private key, being a random number, is not IP.  The presence or absence of laws regarding IP in this hypothetical society would matter as much as the presence or absence of laws regarding oranges.

In the same hypothetical libertarian society that has no IP laws, credit card fraud would still be outlawed because it violates the property rights of others.  It is not the act of copying the credit card number that constitutes the fraud (I might have it legitimately, as a merchant for example), but the act of falsely representing the cardholder's intent by presenting a transaction against his account, the number being just a vehicle to make that misrepresentation.  It is the same whether I make that misrepresentation in person, or if I do it online with the use of a software program (in this case a web browser) that allows me to communicate and express my intent.  I see no reason why Bitcoin fraud would be any different.

I think I haven't explained myself clearly. I'm not trying to say bitcoins and mp3s are IP, or that IP is good, or IP is bad or anything similar. Here's what I'm trying to do:

I'm hypothesizing a [libertarian] society where there is no such thing as IP and I'm asking a question about that society. Now, in this society, it is not permitted to regulate any persons use of their private property, as long as they does not infringe on anyone else's property rights and do not violate the NonAggressionPrinciple (NAP). Read the IP thread I linked to in the OP for more details.

Thus, in this society, duplicating an mp3 cannot be outlawed - no property has been damaged or stolen, and no aggression has occurred.

In these circumstances, therefore, could there be any rational justification for outlawing the copying of a bitcoin private key?  The BPK is not property, and no aggression has taken place.

Just to make it clear, I have an anti-libertarian inclination (though I keep an open mind), and I'm trying to present libertarians with a difficult question. In short: "In your libertarian world, how can you abolish IP and still claim a loss if your bitcoins are stolen? Therefore: get ye gone and sully the bitcoin world no more with your libertarian trash."  Ta-da!  


Assuming you are actually referring to the anti-IPR society, how is it fraud to copy a number, and execute mathematical functions on it? What exactly have I defrauded you of if I copy they keys in your possession, and transfer the associated bitcoins to a key in my possession.

I didn't. I said: "...bitcoin private keys cannot ever be considered physical property. If they are to be considered property at all, it can only be as intellectual property - like an mp3..."
I didn't say because, I said like.

And remember, I was referring to this hypothetical anti-IPR society.

IP is a broad word and cannot be said to be 'invented' at any one time. It is a collection of laws that deal with different specific situations.
The older laws can just as easily be called IP rights.
Before these laws there was no protection.
But then again, culture was not as fruitfull as it is now. Most people were peasants that never got to deal with these issues.
Culture was doing well for the few rich people that could afford it.
Because of the spread of literacy culture started to spread quicker and more people got involved in conflicts about ownership of ideas etc.
So laws were necessary to resolve these conflicts.
The problems we have now come mostly from big firms abusing their position. But that doesn't make IP laws useless, it means the current implementation sucks.

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Maybe. All I'm saying is that the phrase "intellectual property" itself was chosen to pre-bias any discussion in a certain way. We can discuss the legitimacy of me copying something that you have done or created but when it's "intellectual property", then suddenly it's a different ball game.

IP is a broad word and cannot be said to be 'invented' at any one time. It is a collection of laws that deal with different specific situations.
The older laws can just as easily be called IP rights.
Before these laws there was no protection.
But then again, culture was not as fruitfull as it is now. Most people were peasants that never got to deal with these issues.
Culture was doing well for the few rich people that could afford it.
Because of the spread of literacy culture started to spread quicker and more people got involved in conflicts about ownership of ideas etc.
So laws were necessary to resolve these conflicts.
The problems we have now come mostly from big firms abusing their position. But that doesn't make IP laws useless, it means the current implementation sucks.

Well, the protection was there before the phrase "intellectual property" was ever invented. Then it was just a guarantee of a monopoly of the rights to use in exchange for promoting creativity. Though culture was doing pretty well (and possibly even better) before such laws were enacted.

Not quite.
It is just a device invented to protect the livelyhood of creative folks.
What completely screwed it up was the relatively recent extentions of length of this right so even grand-children of the holder can profit. That is of course bullshit and should be reversed immediately.
Another thing that realy screwed it up was transferability. IP should only be expressable by the author period.

But without IP at all we would have a lot less culture. People would just not be able to produce enough of it and survive.

So while the intention was good and it functioned well for many years some rich groups or people screwed it up over the years and now we have shit laws peddled mainly by the US.