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Ask HN: Is there any legal recourse against bitcoin theft?

5 points by GrahamsNumber ↗ HN
In the "ideal" situation that the thief is known, and you are in the same jurisdiction (let's say the US), do you realistically have any legal option against some individual or company that stole your bitcoins? What's to stop say Coinbase from just running away with all your bitcoins? And if they decide one day to do so, can you do anything about it?

7 comments

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patio11
Bitcoin adds virtually no novel legal issues to the question of whether theft is a crime and/or tort in the US.
GrahamsNumber
So say you steal 100 bitcoins from me. If I take you to court, would I expect to win back 100 bitcoins, or the $ value of those 100 bitcoins? What if, by the time the trial ends, bitcoins crash and are worthless? Any liability in this case?
patio11
Whatever you convince the judge to award you. You've still suffered calculable damages in November 2013 if your bitcoins are stolen, even if the bitcoin bubble bursts as of December. These issues are not new.

More broadly, "The US legal system is not prepared to deal with bitcoin" is not the source of systemic risk that you should be terrified of.

GrahamsNumber
I'm not actually as concerned about risk, but more interested in the legal aspect of bitcoin.

I see what you're saying, but how can you prove ownership of bitcoin? Is is just having the private key? Someone hacking your system can get that. Online wallet services have that. Does it mean being the first one to generate the wallet? And even if you have some way of proving ownership of the wallet, how do you prove ownership of the bitcoin? The ownership of property in the US is backed by the US government, and the US government backs property transfer. You can't just take stuff by getting 51% of the population of the US to agree that the stuff is yours.

EDIT:

Another point: I get your private key and send all your bitcoins to some other wallet. How do you prove that I was the one that did it, and that you did not agree to it?

chc
As far as I can tell, these issues aren't novel. They seem like the sort of the thing that might arise in any property dispute case.
rmc
Just because someone has possession of a thing (whether it be your bit coin private key, or debit card and PIN number, or my car) doesn't mean they now legally own it. A theft can still have happened.
J_Darnley
Do I recall correctly that some people were prosecuted for some kind of theft involving World of Warcraft items? This was maybe 7 or 8 years ago and I'm not sure I am even remembering it correctly. Perhaps they were only charged with some kind of computer misuse crime. Perhaps it was only a civil case. I don't remember.

If you want to see what might have happened when digital object is truly stolen, try looking up what happened in this vague case.