IANAL but I would be surprised if any jurisdiction didn’t find that was the case.
Difficulty in proving something happened doesn’t suddenly make it legal.
As the thief, you could only plausibly claim you mined it if you stole it from someone who did (as otherwise there would be a history of UTXOs). Depending on the history of the coins in question, it could be used as evidence.
Ie if one of the last prior UTXO was associated the gov airdropping it to Alice, 65yo non-techie, still having those keys on her iPhone, and then maybe sending some to her nephew and spending it on a webshop order shipped to her home address, and then Bob, 35yo CS Phd with addiction problems... I’d say that’s more evidence than what’s needed to put someone in jail in many places. But I think as with many things legal it’d depend a lot on the circumstances in the individual case.
People have been found guilty of defrauding people of cryptocurrency. It’s not that exotic.
This made me thinking, if you want to “insure” yourself for such a potential future situation, construct a hash of an arbitrary secret, sign it with your private key, and publish it on-chain. If you’d end up as the victim in that scenario, you could present the preimage, thereby presenting proof you had control of the keys at that point in time, as opposed to gaining access to them recently.
I wonder if the Lightning wallet they’re using has enough information for its internal database to already have that, considering how Lightning channels and payments work.
Difficulty in proving something happened doesn’t suddenly make it legal.
As the thief, you could only plausibly claim you mined it if you stole it from someone who did (as otherwise there would be a history of UTXOs). Depending on the history of the coins in question, it could be used as evidence.
Ie if one of the last prior UTXO was associated the gov airdropping it to Alice, 65yo non-techie, still having those keys on her iPhone, and then maybe sending some to her nephew and spending it on a webshop order shipped to her home address, and then Bob, 35yo CS Phd with addiction problems... I’d say that’s more evidence than what’s needed to put someone in jail in many places. But I think as with many things legal it’d depend a lot on the circumstances in the individual case.
People have been found guilty of defrauding people of cryptocurrency. It’s not that exotic.
This made me thinking, if you want to “insure” yourself for such a potential future situation, construct a hash of an arbitrary secret, sign it with your private key, and publish it on-chain. If you’d end up as the victim in that scenario, you could present the preimage, thereby presenting proof you had control of the keys at that point in time, as opposed to gaining access to them recently.
I wonder if the Lightning wallet they’re using has enough information for its internal database to already have that, considering how Lightning channels and payments work.