Is It Stealing if the Vendor Doesn’t See You Take It? Part 2

Nicsho 10 Comments November 21, 2014

Meet Reddit user “btclostandfound“. On November 14th, he asked the genius Borg hivemind that is r/Bitcoin, “If I find 61 BTC on a laptop at a garage sale and I don’t return it, am I a monster?”

About 2 weeks ago I was rummaging around a garage sale (as I often do on the weekends) and found an old Dell laptop that was in fairly good condition and paid $50 for it. I’m fairly into tinkering with old electronics and such so before I reformatted the drive, I decided to go snooping. To my amazement, It had an old version of bitcoin qt on it which contained about 61 btc in an unencrypted wallet. At first i thought i was could good to be true but I was able to transfer the btc into the wallet on my computer with the help of a friend who knows way more about btc than I do. He was shocked as well. Next week I plan on selling about 1/2 of the stash on coinbase and use the money to buy a car. Am I a terrible person because i have no intention of giving any of the bitcoins back?

Now, before we continue, we should point out the following:

61 BTC, as of Nov. 18th, is worth $23,040 dollars, at $377.70 per BTC.
In California, Grand Theft is when property has been taken at over $950. We’re using California as a reference, because Grand Theft law changes from state to state. Legal Match pegs the average you’d need to steal as somewhere in the $500-$1,000 range.
A Third Bullet Point!

But, hey! He is generous:

I did give my friend a few bitcoins for helping me out.

That would make his friend an accomplice. Hey, that could be our third bullet point!

At this point, the Bitcoin community, who, may I remind you, loves “Be Selfish” icon Ayn Rand like no other, gave the following bits of advice:

mustyoshi

Pretty sure you’re fine legally.

But if you’re so concerned about the law, why don’t you return it? I’m sure the person would give you a portion for being a good person.

justanothershibehere

It would be a great thing for the collective if you were to take $1,000 cash, put it in an envelope and go put it in their mailbox. Anonymous $1,000 would brighten their world. Plus you just received $2x,XXX for nothing, don’t be a dick, spread the love.

Yeah, man, spread the love, don’t be a dick. Just give back 1/26th of what you stole. Hell, you’re practically Robin Hood at this point!

SatoshisGhost

You should drop off in the persons mailbox some cold hard cash after you sell some of the coins, as pay back for the good luck they brought to you.

What is it with these people and mailboxes?

CryptoEra

OP doesn’t have to do a fucking thing. He found bitcoin at a garage sale..so what? It would be from his good graces if he gave the previous owner any compensation. Its 100% his decision if he wants to give back. That’s the beauty of bitcoin. Once you own it…nobody can get it back unless you let them.

Yeah, he shouldn’t have to give back money he technically stole! What Mt. Gox incident?!

Blawpaw

If that’s true, and if you are really the honest guy as you are trying to prove to be with this post, you should use it for tiping and for charity! You can start by Tiping me ðŸ™‚ Here, have my BTC address: [Ed: Not posting the address, fuck you Blawpaw.]

btclostandfound

Why would I tip you? Youre not even being helpful.

(In case you need to brush up on the “tipping” community, here’s that for you.)

There was also an impressive ”analogy-off“:

ferretinjapan

Say someone sells a nice jewellery box under the assumption that there is nothing in it, but lo and behold maybe a previous deceased owner knew of a secret compartment that the seller didn’t and stashed some juicy items there. You just happened to, through rigorous examination, find the key to opening said compartment.

[…]

Think of it in land sale terms. Neither you nor the seller is aware the land in question has a huge reserve of oil. After the sale you discover oil on your land. Is the previous seller entitled to compensation? I can only think that if you were aware of the oil reserves before you settled the sale, could you be held liable for compensation (or fraud).

You’re safe IMO.

floodle

Imagine that if in that secret compartment you found a key and that key was the key for a car parked outside the house – can you take the car? Private keys are not the same as bitcoins – the OP didn’t find bitcoins he found private keys.

ferretinjapan

That’s a bad analogy because it has a number of inconsistencies. The car’s ownership is not linked to whoever has a copy of the key, sure you can drive off with the car, but you can’t claim ownership because it is registered in the government’s DMV database. A Bitcoin’s private key implies control AND ownership.

A better analogy is if this hidden compartment contained the deed to a house, car or shares in a company. Could I claim control/ownership of the house/car/shares, by taking the deed and registering the property/car/shares in my name? In many cases, unless the previous owner claims theft, and as long as no fraud occurred, the person that discovers the deeds in a small hidden compartment can do just that.

floodle

…Your analogy is wrong – you don’t seem to understand the difference between a private key and bitcoins – they are not the same. OP didn’t find any bitcoins, they found the private key.

ferretinjapan

It is true and it does hold up to scrutiny, they both control and own the key so whoever moves it first is the legitimate owner in the eyes of the blockchain, you can also not prove whether one has lost the keys or not so it is completely plausible in OP’s case that the keys were forgotten or lost and OP serendipitously rediscovered them in a dusty old machine.

floodle

So if you spot a friends private key you think it’s OK to sweep their wallet?

It goes on like that for about 2 more pages.

Eventually, he updated his original post with his decision:

Decided that I am going to send them an anonymous post with $1000 cash and use the rest to buy my new mustang. Yay! Thanks for all the advice guys. And as for all the jelly haters…lol suck it!

That’s right. He said “suck it” in a post about potentially stealing money. That attitude doesn’t have an especially good track record.

This also brings up two very important points about the Bitcoin community as a whole:

1. They have no souls.

2. They are terrible with money.

He found the coins within the last two weeks, and he has probably thought far more about how to spend them than he has about the right way to handle the situation, not realizing that this is, in fact, illegal. People get money wired accidentally into their accounts all the time. That is not a crime in and of itself, because, most of the time, it’s not your fault. It becomes a crime when you take the money and spend it, like the story of the Athens, GA teen who accidentally got $31,000 and blew $20K almost immediately, then lied and said it was inheritance money. It didn’t work. I bet 0.000001 Satoshi that this guy, WHEN he gets caught, will be arrested, based on the same reason.

Meanwhile, the r/Bitcoin community is seemingly split as to whether it should be returned (yes) or kept (you’re an idiot). Let’s not forget that the community has backed up thieves before: when some guy exposed a QR code with $20 bucks worth of the ‘Coin on Bloomberg TV, it was stolen. The guy who did it bragged on Reddit, and he got 400 upvotes. This is not a noble community, despite their claims to the contrary.

One thing that was brought up a lot was that just because the laptop was sold, it didn’t mean that the bitcoins themselves were abandoned; the owner might have held onto the private key on their new computer. By using these coins to buy a shitty car, ”btclostandfound” is going to end up taking this other guy’s coins, just ’cause. If that is the case, this really is stealing. And, therefore, criminal. Good job, Bitcoin community! Your stellar track record of trusting criminals is going strong!

10 Comments

Terrible
November 22, 2014 @ 2:51 am

Where’s that imgur gallery about some dude buying a Gamecube at a garage sale and finding like eight hundred dollars and an N64 stuck in various compartments of the Gamecube? It seems relevant.

- Dared00
  November 22, 2014 @ 7:44 am
  
  Here it is: http://imgur.com/a/sneoW
  
Curt Shaffer
December 4, 2014 @ 10:56 pm

Ha, Hey he bought the laptop and it’s contents. A win for him.

If I bought a wallet at a garage sale and it had $26,000 in it then it’s a win for me. Don’t know why it would be any different if it is an analog or digital wallet. It’s not as if he went online to their bank site and used the saved passwords to empty their bank accounts.

Lesson to be learned here is clean out your damn wallet if you are going to sell it.

- Rob
  December 9, 2014 @ 6:07 pm
  
  If you buy a closet at a garage sale in it and they accidentally left a copy of their house keys in it you don’t now own their house. If you buy a computer with a browser still logged in to internet banking you’re not allowed to clean out someone’s accounts. If you buy a computer with bitcoin access keys on it you don’t then own the bitcoins they give you access to.
  
  - Curt Shaffer
    December 29, 2014 @ 4:36 am
    
    Buy a closet? what does that even mean? If you mean the contents of the closet then no, just because you find a house house key doesn’t mean you own the house.
    
    But what if the person was selling you a lot, but then when you said you want to move in they said, but the house isn’t yours.
    
- Wampler Longacre
  December 29, 2014 @ 3:55 am
  
  Lesson to be learned here is that I should never, ever, let YOU anywhere near my backup drives, you feckless criminal.
  
  - Curt Shaffer
    December 29, 2014 @ 4:38 am
    
    Why? if you didn’t sell them to me I wouldn’t have any cause to use whats on them.
    
    - Wampler Longacre
      December 29, 2014 @ 4:52 am
      
      You’ve already proven that “cause” is the same as “opportunity” in your mind. Again: Stay away.
      
      - Curt Shaffer
        December 29, 2014 @ 4:59 am
        
        You’ve made that assumption, but that is on you.
        
        I just think if you sell me something (make a transaction when I exchange money for goods) then I own it.
        
        I hope next time you buy a bottle of pop that the guys from Coke don’t race out to spill your drink on the ground. They might just say, “you only bought the bottle.” I’m sure you’d be cool with that.
ed
March 2, 2017 @ 3:36 am

whoever wrote this crap is just a troll. in fact this whole site seems to a weird tongue-in-cheek farce