There are broadly speaking two theories of ownership, and we've explored them here tangentially in recent days (#1498047, #1496074)
- POSSESSION: You own what you hold -- control, possess, have. Anything else (legal, moral, community norms) is empty fluff. Until recently in technological developments, this is mostly considered the domain of extralegal organizations and inter-family squabbles (read: children).
- LEGAL RULES: You own what your jurisdiction's legal system claims you own. There are managed list of property and cars and stocks and business interests, every bank has a ledger with amounts next to someone's name. If someone else physically has your car, house, business, or bank account, that makes no difference: It's still yours, and there are men with guns willing to (mostly, anyway...) to uphold that, return the property to you in case it's taken/used by someone else without your permission.
ENTER BITCOINENTER BITCOIN
The ownership ≠ possession is Bitcoin's coolest, most profound innovation (philosophically speaking, anyway #782208). You own what you possess, the keys necessary to move bitcoin are the bitcoin. ZERO slippage between the two concepts: code is law, and courts or men with guns no longer play any role.
That is, Bitcoin is moving our societies from assets being largely dominated by #2 to having more elements of #1. It's a beautiful thing.
Strange outcomes: thieves $5-wrench attack you and now your bitcoin is theirs. Complain to the blue-colored men with guns all you want, you're not getting it back.
Strange outcome in the opposite direction: you find bitcoin on the street, it's yours. Nobody can stop you or claim otherwise. Of course, bitcoin aren't physical, so how someone "finds" something on the street is, uh, undetermined.
Owning Someone Else's BitcoinOwning Someone Else's Bitcoin
Yeah, I mean of course some schmuck was gonna try using #2 for bitcoin, even though it's a type #1 phenomenon.
Levine discusses the famous garbage dump guy (8,000 bitcoin in a throwaway laptop in a dump somewhere; dude wants permission to dig up the place and find it) and how he has the social kudos to be the presumed owner of those coins by virtue of having publicly talked about this forever. Tokenize the claim, etc #1498170.
Next up: some dude trying to use New York's Finders' Keepers law... if you find some valuable property and can't locate the owner, the procedure is
- bring it to the police
- you and the police try to find the owner to give back the lost property
- if you can't, after some time, the property is yours. Finders Keepers
Of course, then, the guy locates a bunch of on-chain addresses that haven't moved in forever. Uses some algo to determine which ones are lost, and then every month goes to the police with a list. They've advertised for the owners, asked them to sign messages to prove they're not lost; some of the addresses did this, and were excluded.
The rest, claims the New York man, should befall him as FINDER. Writes Levine:
"Technically he is suing the anonymous holders of all 39,069 forgotten Bitcoin wallets for a declaration that they are his now.""Technically he is suing the anonymous holders of all 39,069 forgotten Bitcoin wallets for a declaration that they are his now."
Will this work? I have no idea. It is not at all clear to me that he “found” these abandoned Bitcoin wallets; certainly he didn’t find them “in” New York. He delivered something to the police, and no one claimed it, and the police gave it back to him, but it’s a stretch to say that he delivered “the Bitcoin wallets” to the police. Anyone could have written down the same list of public keys and handed it to the police; arguably he handed the police a trivially reproducible reference to the abandoned property, not the property itself. Still, maybe?
BENEFIT? Fucking bragging rights... I own millions of bitcoin... can't move them, can't use them etc because I don't possess them type #1, but at least I got a court to say that I own them per #2. Oh, lol
he’d be able to say, accurately, that he owns many millions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoins. Which is better than not owning many millions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoins. Even if they’re all someone else’s Bitcoins. Finders keepers!
Amazing.
https://newsletterhunt.com/emails/343538
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-05-28/the-bitcoin-lost-and-found
I wonder if assets gained through the Finders Keepers law are taxable income.
(and now I see that @Undisciplined is way ahead of me, as usual)
An interesting case would be if this jerk wins his lawsuit and the law declares him the owner and then someone else moves the bitcoin. What will he do? If it's in NY, I imagine he might try to take the person to court (if he can identify them) and I could see a world where our stupid courts would actually try to enforce his claims.
But still, not your keys, not your coins.
My avatar isn’t Quick Draw by accident
I know the feeling.
Maybe we gotta switch to "not your courts, not your coins"?
If he wins the case and the coins subsequently move, does he get to claim the loss from theft or does he get hit with a massive taxable event?
I don't think so:
I share your enthusiasm here. It's pretty incredible and as long as cryptography holds it provides some resistance to courts.
I suspect NYC counts found stuff as income, so he should probably be careful.
certainly its counts... but I thought you abolished the aristocracy over there in the treasonous colonies?
Duh, we replaced the aristocrats with benevolent overlords. Crack a book sometime.
what's a book? I only do summaries and articles. https://x.com/AlexAndBooks_/status/2059340007555420625
https://twiiit.com/AlexAndBooks_/status/2059340007555420625
“Money has no owners only spenders”
-Omar Little (HBO Show The Wire)
So true with Fiat dollars but Bitcoin absolutely destroys this paradigm.
He found a list of addresses, turned it in, so it should be only fair that the police return the list of addresses to him when it befalls to him as the finder.
Three theories, a la #1496894
i.e. ownership is an illusion