Mr. and Mrs. 1 and 11 posts , you have no idea what your talking about. The law always works around new inventions and always has.
There is a legal maxim. For every right , there is a remedy. Bitcoin was released under the MIT License. So there is a right of use. A court of equity will fashion a remedy suited for the controversy.
AS far as enforcing said title. I could , if phantomcircuit would sell me his claim. That's called an assignment of a chose in action. He called also do what is called a election of remedies. He can waive the tort and sue in assumpsit for the received value of the stolen items.
Seriously you guys haven't a clue in the world. You are talking out your ass.
This is hilarous. You are hilarious. At best you
might be able to file a civil suit against him in small claims court. How much are flights from the UK these days? ~600BTC? No, he's not going to jail. There was no "theft." Failure to return data that was IM'd to you is not theft. Failure to return something sent to you unsolicited is not a scam.
But please, reach harder.
Says who ? you? I would pile on some court cases , from the UK even, but I doubt your reading comprehension is capable of absorbing a court holding. Suffice to say UK is a common law country. Unfortunately, you don't know that crimes used to be prosecuted by regular people in the name of the public in addition to their own personal civil suit. The only thing you have to prove is that the act is an injury to the public interest. Not hard considering the public currency was used as an instrument of the theft. The difference between a civil action and a crime is nearly non-existant. The difference is whose interest is being protected. There is much overlap especially when the victim is a member of the public. I bet you don't even know that individual people can prosecute their own crimes without using some gov't agent.
Unjust Enrichment. Look it up.
The only thing that is going to determine the outcome is how much phantomcircuit persues justice.
Another thing , how do you know the guy is in the UK ? Are you a co-conspirator?
Chew on this. Lords Mansfield is British.
Another, and very fertile source of such obligations, is found in the right to recover money paid in error. And since payment, as we have seen, includes the delivery of any specific thing whether money or not, the right of action for a repetition has the same broad scope. You may remember that in the case of Moses vs. Marferlan, 2 Burrows, 1005, Lord Mansfield held that if the defendant be under an obligation from the ties of natural justice to refund, the law implies such an obligation founded on the equity of the plaintiff's case, "as it were upon a contract, quasi ex contractu, as the Roman law expressed it."
As a general rule, in order to have a recovery, the thing given must not have been due, either by a perfect or a natural obligation, and the belief in the existence of a debt must have resulted from a mistake, and, as a general rule, from a mistake of fact.