Topic: What if you bought some of those stolen Mt Gox Bitcoins? - page 2. (Read 9170 times)

Cash = legal tender.

Gold != legal tender

Gold can be confiscated if you buy it and it was stolen property.

Can't you read my prior post, or are you fucking blind?

Legal tender is given this protection, because the government provides consumer protection against theft, e.g. FDIC insurance, tracking down serial numbers on bills, chargebacks on credit cards, etc.. It is their racket, and so they give it is special status.

Sorry if this was discussed, but in USA if you buy stolen property and you are caught with it you have to return it to the original owner at your loss.

Indeed the above is all theoretical bullshit that won't help you in reality. The law is the law. The will and power of society is what wins because BITCOIN IS NOT ANONYMOUS. And Mt.Gox's Terms of Service was (as I documented in a linked post in an upthread post) they were acting as an agent with YOUR bitcoin property.


Irrelevant, the law can confiscate other real property and/or garnish wages, because BITCOIN IS NOT ANONYMOUS.

Notwithstanding that the consensus is already controlled by a few mining pools, which can easily be expropriated by the government either overtly or covertly.


No. They would have gone to a judge for a fair ruling, if there was enough incentive, but apparently not enough people were harmed wrongly in order to bring it to court.


I agree one of the solutions is decentralized exchange, but this won't stop all the theft and criminal activities that are tainting Bitcoin in ever increasing proportions.

Only will be true with rock solid, widespread anonymity. And Bitcoin will NEVER have that!  Never.


It could be, with rock solid, widespread anonymity. But Bitcoin doesn't have this and NEVER will.

Tl;Dr Repudiation is always possible if there is not rock solid, widespread anonymity.

Tl;Dr Code is law iff the identities of the participants can not be discovered.

Irrelevant, the law can confiscate other real property and/or garnish wages, because BITCOIN IS NOT ANONYMOUS.

Notwithstanding that the consensus is already controlled by a few mining pools, which can easily be expropriated by the government either overtly or covertly.

No. They would have gone to a judge for a fair ruling, if there was enough incentive, but apparently not enough people were harmed wrongly in order to bring it to court.

It could be, with rock solid, widespread anonymity. But Bitcoin doesn't have this and NEVER will.

There is no such thing as a stolen bitcoin.

Bitcoin is not property.

It is a ledger with a set of rules. Those rules are determined by consensus and enforced by the protocol. If you choose to take part in the game, you agree to accept the validity of the rules, and any future changes to the rules as determined by consensus.

With bitcoin, the rule is unambiguous: Whoever validly signs the transaction, "owns" the bitcoin.  

You cannot claim to be a legal "owner" of some bitcoin if you do not have the ability to sign (ie. knowledge of private key) because the bitcoin clients/developers/businesses never made such a promise, implicitly or explicitly, and the above rule was clear from the start.

Just because around 2010 everyone started behaving as if it was property doesn't make it property.  The mtgox victims never actually owned any bitcoins. At best, they owned bitcoin IOUs. It's sad that they were misled by mtgox's marketing and that we failed to educate them better about the above.

If you think this is all just theoretical musings,  remember this:

Any bitcoin can be "dispropriated " by consensus.  Not by the government, not by the legal system, not by the police, but only by the protocol itself.

if bitcoin were property in any legal sense those protocol changes would have been Illegal!

PS. I don't want to condone antisocial behaviour like the mtgox heists, but the solution should come from the protocol itself, eg. in the form of multisig and timelocked transaction. It should not come from wrongly treating bitcoins as property.

Tl;Dr code is law

There is no such thing as a stolen bitcoin.

Bitcoin is not property.

It is a ledger with a set of rules. Those rules are determined by consensus and enforced by the protocol. If you choose to take part in the game, you agree to accept the validity of the rules, and any future changes to the rules as determined by consensus.

With bitcoin, the rule is unambiguous: Whoever validly signs the transaction, "owns" the bitcoin.  

You cannot claim to be a legal "owner" of some bitcoin if you do not have the ability to sign (ie. knowledge of private key) because the bitcoin clients/developers/businesses never made such a promise, implicitly or explicitly, and the above rule was clear from the start.

Just because around 2010 everyone started behaving as if it was property doesn't make it property.  The mtgox victims never actually owned any bitcoins. At best, they owned bitcoin IOUs. It's sad that they were misled by mtgox's marketing and that we failed to educate them better about the above.

If you think this is all just theoretical musings,  remember this:

Any bitcoin can be "dispropriated " by consensus.  Not by the government, not by the legal system, not by the police, but only by the protocol itself.

This has already happened twice. Once after the generation bug in 2010 and once after the forking event in 2012.

if bitcoin were property in any legal sense those protocol changes would have been Illegal! which would be absurd because they were commited by the very owners of that property, ie the collective of all miners and users.

PS. I don't want to condone antisocial behaviour like the mtgox heists, but the solution should come from the protocol itself, eg. in the form of multisig and timelocked transaction. It should not come from wrongly treating bitcoins as property.

Tl;Dr code is law

There is hundreds of years of case law that already settled this question.

In most jurisdictions (Switzerland being an exception) if you purchase stolen unique goods, such as a painting or a sculpture, even if you didn't know that it was stollen and you acted in good faith, the legal title for these goods remains with the original owner.  

This does not apply, however, to non-unique or fungible items like dollar bills or bitcoins.  If your restaurant receives payment in bills that were stolen from a bank robbery, then these bills remain your property provided you received them in good faith (i.e., you weren't in on some sort of money laundering operation).  This applies even if the serial numbers of the stolen bills are known.  If you think about it, a cash economy couldn't function any other way!  

Another note is that, even after a few transactions, you can't really refer to "this bitcoin" or "that bitcoin".   Let's say Alice unknowingly receives a stollen 1 BTC coin.  She then sends that 1 BTC to Bob using the Blockchain.info SharedCoin feature.  Shared coin merges, for example, ten 1 BTC outputs (all from different people) into 1 transaction, and then send those bitcoins out to, say, 10 different addresses.  There is no longer a blockchain record that shows that Alice's address sent 1 BTC to Bob's address.  Instead, Bob's bitcoin has 10% taint with the bitcoin that Alice sent.  Now, if Bob sends 5 mBTC from that coin to pay for a coffee, and then the merchant moves all customer payments for the week to a new address (and thus likely into a single, say, 5 BTC coin) this new coin shares 0.01% taint with the original stolen coin that Alice unknowingly received from MtGox.  

Pretty soon, the taint has diffused throughout the economy!

As an experiment: go to blockchain.info and look-up one of your bitcoin addresses and select the "taint analysis" option. I bet there is taint linking it to hundreds or thousands of other addresses.  There's a good chance that your address has 0.0023% taint of a coin used for something illegal.  Just like a few of the twenty-dollar bills that you'll use this year had at some point in the past been used to pay for marijuana.    

In conclusion:
- If you receive stollen coins in good faith, they become your legal property.  
- After several transactions, a 100% stollen coins get fuzzed-out across numerous coins, each sharing a small amount of taint with the original.  

Gold is going to rise WHEN capital realizes that we have a geopolitical problem [after 2015] and there is uncertainly on the horizon as to what monetary system emerges afterwards. This is the real issue – not inflation. Plain and simple, gold reach $875 in 1980 and the Dow 1,000. The Dow has reached almost 17,000 and gold at its peak below $2,000. From a plain numbers game, the Dow was a far better hedge against “inflation” than gold since 1980.

Congrats, let us know when the article comes out.

First walk to wardrobe.. Open bottom drawer... Remove thinking cap... Then Put on head.

This is simple logic, with a dash of common sense sprinkled on top for you.. enjoy...

How many bank robberies have taken place over the past 100 years? ...Store robberies... Brinks truck heists... Casino Heists... There is ALWAYS a % of this "legal-tender" you speak of that is NEVER recovered.

Why do you think that is? (I hope you have your thinking cap on properly) ...Do you think these bills are just dispensed into the realms of the unknown? Of course not, they are spent - laundered etc.

"Legal-tender" or not... If I walk to the store, buy some milk, receive change and it turns of that ONE bill was "stolen" many years, months or days before - do I have an obligation to return this bill? ...does the government have the right to seize this bill?... Of course not!

hmmm the gox problem.

0) figure out the exact amount of missing coins and figure out where they went

1) verify which balance include part of the stolen ones

2) Contact persons in possession by finding  actual Identities without infringing on rights....for which said agency is opening it'self wide for a class privacy lawsuit

3) prove that they actually are in my possession

4) gain access to my wallet
5) try to break my password, 215 characters
6) separate stolen from legitimate inputs

7) figure out which gox customer exactly owned those particular coins
manage to distribute each and every coin to its owner

this all assumes i am in the U.S, now, in my country the U.S has no power

How would you propose they return coins to the victim of a theft if his coins are now distributed as taint across 24,000 other coins?  Say Sally has 1 BTC that has 0.002% taint of a coin that was stolen from Sam.  Would they correlate Sally's human identity with her 1 BTC wallet, find her somehow, and then ask for 0.002% x 1 BTC = 2000 Satoshi's back?  And then they would find the other 23,999 coins and do the same?  And what if Sally was also the victim of a theft at some prior point in time, but the Coin Rescuers hadn't found her coins yet.  She might be upset that you're taking some of her coins, when she was a victim herself.  Do you think you could add an appeal process so that victims waiting for their settlements could defer having a portion of their coins removed?

hmmm the gox problem.

0) figure out the exact amount of missing coins and figure out where they went
1) verify which balance include part of the stolen ones
2) Contact persons in possession by finding  actual Identities without infringing on rights....for which said agency is opening it'self wide for a class privacy lawsuit
3) prove that they actually are in my possession
4) gain access to my wallet
5) try to break my password, 215 characters
6) separate stolen from legitimate inputs
7) figure out which gox customer exactly owned those particular coins
manage to distribute each and every coin to its owner

quite frankly without trying to confuse each other with technical stuff....it's a non starter.

this all assumes i am in the U.S, now, in my country the U.S has no power, no say in legal matters and definitely not on illegitimate currency. So, what if 45% of the coins are in countries that do not care what Americans do? This exercise (theoretically) would only be useful if it were a national crypto currrecy, not one that is spread over the world, and certainly not in one whose tx are irreversible.

Get off that iPhone man. Bitcoin is all Android, all the time.

iPhone is good for checking up on that fiat in your Citibank account, because Apple has taken what can only be called an "Anti-Bitcoin" stance.

so far I would have to say it's a yes and no answer. In theory yes you have tainted goods, whether its currency or not does not matter, but  no most of us would not have to give it back or have it confiscated because as time goes by and users move their btc around it will become harder and harder to track.

But if you have a wallet full of stolen/missing btc, and it is traced to you, then that would not be good......

the point.....use your btc more and more.......i know i felt stupid when Apple removed btc wallets from the APP store and I didn't have a wallet on my iphone when I could have had one....but alas there is a remedy for that and so now I have BTC (small amount in case of loss)
on my phone so I can eat.....now to find a restaurant that takes my BTC

sure they do,

the OP is correct if you are able to track, trace, or connect the dots then you are obligated to return the money.

Jewish organizations are collecting gold, money, and many other valuable things that they were able to convince a judge, and or jury that was stolen from their people during their stay at auschwitz concentration camps.   

the blockchain provides a perfect vehicle for that connecting of the dots.

Now let's look at it in a bit of a different way, if I sold my car to you and you gave me counterfeit money which I took to the bank, who subsequently confiscated said fakes funds.  Do you think you are off the hook for my money?  Of course not, regardless of the law, but in this case the law is on my side.   You would also need to do some 'spaning to the coppers.

The very definition of money laundering is taking ill gotten gains and introducing it into legal commerce.  So if you purchased a btc for $40 when the going rate was $80 or $800 there is likely a good reason for it.    The block chain might not be able to tell us the market rate for the coin at that time but you can put together perfect valuations for what the coin was worth at the time of the transfer simply be average all of the coins sold in that block or perhaps the chain of blocks for that hour surrounding that transaction.


being uncooperative only serves to distance yourself from the good of the community, as the community matures it will tend to remember the bad guy with perfect recall

I doubt that this would happen.  The Bitcoins would not have the same address.  They are not the same Bitcoins.

Maybe Bitcoins obtained straight from a stolen source are one thing, but Bitcoins that have transferred MANY times with differing amounts over a year?  What basis would that be?  They do not do that with cash or currency.