What do you usually call someone who takes a thing from its owner without permission?
Yeah, someone was silly to pay hard earned money in exchange from useless tokens. It was a gamble. If the useless tokens get stolen, I'm sorry to say, but whoever paid for BTC already lost their wealth in the first place when they converted whatever they had before for it.
It's true that information is infinitely abundant. However, unlike copyrighted works, private keys are not supposed to be shared. There should never be more than one copy of that number in the entire universe. If people can brute force keys by guessing, we've probably got bigger problems.
Obtaining that number without authorization is already a crime. Accessing computers illegally to exfiltrate data is already a crime. Breaking into a physical safe in order to obtain a paper key is already a crime.
Sure thing. Hence, the importance of analyzing each case individually. If unauthorized computer access is used, sure thing a crime was committed. If someone created a wallet using a stupid wallet generator which used this website to "create" private keys, and someone else also had this silly idea, and someone deposited Bitcoin on a wallet created by this mean and and someone else took it, then no crime was committed.
You don't even need the website. Cryptographic keys are just numbers. All data is just numbers. You can write simple code to generate all numbers from zero to infinity and it will eventually generate all cryptograhpic keys, all computer files, all copyrighted works, all hate speech, all child abuse material, everything that can possibly be represented as data.
The thing is the search space is so unfathomably large that such a program will never produce useful results. This is central to cryptography. If a private key is copied, it must have been done so illegally or accidentally. Any other option means the cryptography is defective.
This is the complete opposite of copyrighted works whose entire purpose is copying. The data is already known and they're hopelessly trying to regulate access to it.
And these days, they way society is using traditional currency is become less tangible all the time. It’s is 100% possible to live life with never touching physical currency. Get paid via direct deposit, credit cards for your daily expenses, ACH your housing bill and credit card expenses. All just information flowing around.
Crypto is certainly overhyped and overvalued days, but it’s seems that at the core, crypto and modern banking are accomplishing the same thing: managing numbers(information) that people value.
You may get lucky with KYC, but who in their right mind would gen a collision only to get caught on the cash out?
You're not in control once someone has your pk unless you can mobilize a 51% attack to fix your problem.