Suppose that you find out that someone's laptop store - where they sell laptops made with
uniquely colored metal cases - has been robbed, and you notice that someone is trying to sell a lot of these "designer" laptops. You can:
- 1) Ignore the situation so as to avoid any trouble.
- 2) Suggest to the seller that he seems to be fencing stolen laptops.
- 3) Let others know that you suspect these laptops are stolen.
- 4) Buy one, since they are being sold at a healthy discount.
- 5) Go to the Police to report that you think you know who the thief is.
Most people simplify this to only two options, #5 and all the others put together. They simplify it because they don't want responsibility.
I think the moral thing to do is talk to the seller, and then publish, assuming the seller proves guilty and unrepentant. People like to argue against my position by assuming that it will lead to the government meddling of #5, which is a valid concern, but letting such an assumption prevent a good deed doesn't seem right to me. Perhaps the answer is to decry government involvement (Lord knows I always do!), but at the same time, inform the thief and then others in order to help solve the same problem which sends baser people scrambling toward the government parasites.
The last option, I agree, is more horrible than the theft itself. Government "justice" doesn't help heal wounds. It makes them deeper and more destructive in the hope of justifying its own theft (taxation) by tickling our fancy for revenge. The right way is to shun, ostracize, publish, and otherwise encourage the criminals to reverse their crime. Reversing is pretty easy with Bitcoin. The criminal can even negotiate some kind of reward for identifying a weakness in the security systems of the victim.
If I am ever a victim of a heist, I imagine I will offer miners a portion of what was stolen if A) it is ever returned, and B) they exclude transactions that use my stolen bitcoins (except the one to an address I provide, obviously).
There are already a lot of discussions around bitcoin heists. I think some miners may feel that it is immoral to accept a transaction they believe to involve stolen bitcoins just to get the network fee, but it's too much work to filter them out. It would be nice if mining software had the option to exclude transactions from particular addresses just because the miner feels that the bitcoin in them was stolen. But that decision must be left to the miner! So of course it would be horrible for the law to require that they filter out certain addresses, and miners would be morally obligated (in my opinion and that of Dr. King's - duty to break unjust laws and all) to ignore that law. And let's plan to DDOS whatever govt website contains such addresses if they ever make such a law.
Is my position ethical? Aside from the difficulty of informing the mining community of the offer, is there anything else that makes my plan impractical? If there were a way to register a heist and assemble an ad hoc bitcoin jury to study the evidence, would you be interested in using this technique? Why or why not?
To those who prefer to get the police involved: kindly fuck off :-)
To those who prefer do nothing: Please reconsider, as other people's use of bitcoin is loosening the bonds of monetary slavery in which central banks have trapped us all, and bitcoin heists are probably the biggest threat to its growing effect.
On the other hand, perhaps you feel that every victim of a bitcoin heist deserves what he gets for being sloppy. I disagree, and maybe that's because I like helping too much. Hmm...
