To steal something implies that there was a legitimate owner of that something. Be it a physical thing or intellectual property.
I disagree with your reasoning.
We are not talking about ownership or rights to numbers, but to the right to get a reward for the time spent and the result with the technology used. if someone has spent time, money to look for the private key, and you want to use this information (because the transfer will reveal the public key, thus you have the possibility of RBF, and you are only waiting for this public key, not looking for the solution to the puzzle itself) then it is not ethical.
It can be compared to cheating on an exam.
This sounds extremely hypocritical.
Let's say we have two persons, Alice and Bob.
Then someone gives them an exercise:
A. find the solution of this problem:
Given A as a hash of a hash of an EC point coordinate of some hidden number H between 0 and 2**65, find H
OR
B. find the solution of this problem:
Given a point P of some hidden number H between 0 and 2**129, find H.
Now, if Alice and Bob are in their right minds, they would ask: why the hell would I even try either of these?
The Professor would reply:
"Well, if either of you solves A, they can use it to open this treasure chest of 6.6 BTC. If either of you solves B, you can use it to open this treasure chest of 13 BTC. Both of you can try to solve any of the two problems."
Well then, Alice and Bob can now compete to solve A, B, or both. This is not an exam for each of them to work on different problems. They are both motivated ONLY by the fact there is a possibility of a reward.
Now, Alice and Bob both need to invest resources (time, energy, intelligence, frustration) to solve either A or B.
The professor doesn't give a crap about how Alice or Bob reach the solution of either problem. Because the only thing that matters is: can they do it or not?
Now, it all boils down to Alice and Bob. Let's say Alice thinks problem A is more attractive because it sounds easier to solve.
Is that true? Well, this only depends on what Alice thinks. Alice now quits her day job to focus on problem A, gets a loan from the bank to buy computing power, and makes a big dashboard about all the predictions on how much time it will take her to find H of problem A. Total effort made by Alice is only motivated by the dream of a reward.
Bob doesn't care much about the problem, but he reads it more carefully. He observes that problem B is a subset of problem A.
So he generalizes a bit: hmmm, so if there's some strategy to solve B in a general case, can we apply it to A? He goes to the library and learns that problem B is actually solvable in ~2**65 steps, not ~2**129.
So he looks at problem A and asserts: if we would have knowledge of that point, then problem A is solvable in ~2**32 steps.
So Alice (if aware of Bob's observation, which is now published in all newspapers and seen on TV) has a choice to make:
- does she keep looking for H, knowing that its P point will be seen by everyone and is solvable in 2**32 steps?
- accepts her losses so far and calls it a day, shuts down the servers, goes back to the drawing board.
See, neither of them would really even deserve a reward to begin with:
- Alice was ignorant to the definition of the problem; she is trying to buy the solution for some ROI profit;
- Bob really doesn't even care of problem A, he just waits to see if problem A was reduced to having the point P.
Where is Bob unethical in all of this? Bob does not know or care what Alice is doing with her time, efforts, or money.
Bob is not stealing anything, he is simply also solving problem A in a very legitimate way.
Alice and Bob are both motivated only by the reward. Neither of them is trying to revolutionize anything here, because problem A is simple to solve once P is known, but while Alice is brute-forcing her way, Bob is patient.
Now, I think the difference between Alice and Bob is easy to understand.
If there was NO REWARD to solve problem A, it is clear that neither Alice or Bob would even bother.
So why would Alice get upset when Bob (or Eve, or whoever) solves the problem before they do?
Why would Alice's community (thousands of people all trying to do the same thing as Alice) not argue that each of them deserves the reward? Who exactly deserves the prize? Why would it have to be the first person who accidentally stumbles upon it? After so many CPU lightyears of invested work, billions of dollars spent, all of the quit jobs, loans, etc?
See where the hypocrisy really is in all of this. Everyone thinks they deserve something simply because they invested in something that was a stupid idea to begin with.
If Alice was smart, then Bob would still have the same exact strategy. Alice would do the same thing as Bob does. Which in the end would simply mean that everyone is not actually brute-forcing anything, resulting of an infinite wait for the public key by everyone; but which is all worth it because the effort to do this is close to zero, not an enormous amount of effort. But who am I to count the total amount of IQ of whoever wants to be Alice?
