This tragic, horrifying, and truly disgusting story is now going to be my go-to whenever I have to rebut all those people on HN who insist that if the perpetrator successfully acquired the bitcoin, 1) he in no way "stole" it, 2) he morally and legally owns it now, 3) his other actions don't forfeit his title of ownership, 4) any attempt by an authority to recover the bitcoin is unjust, and 5) the Ledger is the infallible source of Truth and, thence, Morality.
> Blockchain is a perfect, transparent trustless global ledger that can't be hacked, so it's a misnomer to characterise these transactions as "cheating", "crimes" or "theft".
> What laws are a North Korean subject to that they have broken? Who decides when a transaction was cheating or stealing without a central authority and enforcer?
> To add to the other comments: do you really have a right to whatever it is that the bits unlocked by that key represent? Who granted you that? AFAICT, it's the systems running the blockchain that grants you that, and it's not governed by any contract outside the blockchain.
> I'm sorry, on the Blockchain we don't recognize legacy concepts like dead-tree nation state laws or ancient superstitions purporting to define morality. The future is all about registering ownership information in digital ledgers.
> I thought this was one of crypto's primary use cases? A kind of "anything goes, anything you can get away with is allowed" sort of approach.
> He did not steal anything. He beat the fund (Indexed Finance) at their own game. He has not stolen anybody's password, has not modified DeFI code - simply executed a set of financial transactions according to the rules (expressed as DeFI smart contracts) and profited from it.
> This. If you believe in cryptocurrencies, you can't run to the courts when people use them as designed, even if they didn't use them as intended.
> Yup. Exactly. "The code is law". Well, sometimes you learn you're not as good at code as you thought you were.
> If what is written on the blockchain is not the law in the context of anything involving blockchains and DeFi, then the whole idea of blockchains and decentralized finance is pointless.
> My personal belief is that this was not fraud and "Code is Law" works.
> Court was outside its jurisdiction here. The fact that the case went forward shows that he was about to be railroaded by corrupt authorities.
You've created one truly idiotic strawman here, partly cherry-picking comments that take the most extreme postures on crypto ownership, postures shared by very few, and equating them with widespread support for torture-murder to acquire cryptocurrency.
People who argue about technicalities of how someone could use code to game a DeFi platform for personal gain are also emphatically not doing the same as defending murder to steal funds. I doubt anyone sane who defended the guy in your latter HN post link would also justify imprisoning someone in a homemade dungeon to mutilate them until they give you their private keys.
This is no better than claiming that all vegans are immoral lunatics by pointing to the activities of a group like the zizians as a representative example.
This kind of nonsense is partly what makes this site, supposedly friendly to exploring the possibilities of interesting technology, into a ridiculous joke when it comes to crypto.
Yes, my intention was to point to the host of comments taking the most extreme postures. If they are weak strawman arguments, that's their own doing, not mine.
GP said they had never seen any of these, so a cherry pick is exactly what was asked for.
I cannot understand how you misread my post as a claim that there is widespread support for torture on HN.
> I doubt anyone sane who defended the guy in your latter HN post link would also justify imprisoning someone in a homemade dungeon to mutilate them until they give you their private keys.
Thanks. You are making my argument for me. I wish all 11 people I quoted earlier could hear this.
