[ExI] bitcoin again

[Adrian Tymes]

On Fri, Nov 25, 2022 at 11:43 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> In the state you and I inhabit, theft of items valued below 950 bucks is
> no longer a felony.  Homeless people may now legally smash your car windows
> to take a 20 dollar sweatshirt: they will treat the broken car window as
> vandalism, which is a misdemeanor and the theft as a misdemeanor, both of
> which are functionally legal for the homeless guy.  Result: lots of broken
> car windows.
>
>
>
> If some judgment-proof homeless guy steals your 200 dollar computer with a
> hundred thousand bucks worth of cryptokeys stored on it, I predict the
> lawman will treat that as a 200 dollar theft and not even bother trying to
> get your 100k in BtC back.  It will be considered a misdemeanor, which is
> functionally legal in our beleaguered crime-ridden state.  Before we
> complain, consider that we did this to ourselves.
>

And what if that computer contained the keys to your stock broker account,
then helped themselves to all the stocks you bought?  Those are assets
which, while they do not have an exact value day-to-day, are recognized by
the courts (precedent) as having non-zero value (so long as their price on
the stock market stays above zero).  Determining the exact value would
require checking the stock markets, which requires the same trivial amount
of effort as it takes to check crypto exchanges for the exact value of a
given cryptocurrency.

Crypto might not be like stocks in all respects, but if it's bought as an
investment, it can be legally treated much the same - and will be, by law
enforcement that wants to justify their arrests.  If you were a cop and you
had arrested that homeless person, would you rather report just a $200
misdemeanor or get credit for bringing in someone who had committed felony
grand theft, just by filling in the paperwork noting the legally
justifiable fair market value of the cryptocurrency, without any risk to
your job (since, again, there is precedent)?
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