The exception to this rule is a "bona fide purchaser for value without notice". If someone has no reason to believe that property is stolen and buys it, then it's their property now. So sorry.
I'm still confused about whether or not bitcoin transactions are traceable. If they have deniability, it might be impossible to prove/disprove that you knew the goods were stolen.
Of course, I am neither a lawyer nor a crypto specialist and this isn't legal advice.
(In particular, the rules vary depending on whether the property is realty, on whether you have a Torrens system, whether you have fused equity and what your local courts and legislatures have decided).
"The exception to this rule is a "bona fide purchaser for value without notice". If someone has no reason to believe that property is stolen and buys it, then it's their property now. So sorry."
This rule only applies in some law systems. Where I live you need both to perform all the reasonable checks and 3 years time to become the owner of the stolen property.
If the original owner shows up before 3 years have passed then you have to get back whatever you have bought. This happens even if you have performed all of the reasonable legitimacy checks.
One exception is land registration - entries in the public land register (even those obtained illegally) protect the purchasers from claims by the original owners (this does not apply to bad faith buyers.)
Withdrawls from MtGox are traceable. It just a payment to an address which has to be known in order to make that payment. So, unless they (MtGox) have lost that address too..
Exactly. He may have seen the unusual dumping of bitcoins as a planned crash. Someone who legitimately acquired them with the intention of doing this dumping in order to prove some point. To prove that these the account was hacked and the coins sold illegally, has anyone seen the police reports?
Uh, is that really so? So I can steal whatever I want, as long as I can sell it off fast enough?
Say I am 99 years old and have only one week left to live. What if I go on a car stealing spree and steal Porsche cars for my extended family. Then I sell it to them for a symbolic 1 cent each, claiming that I have collected them over my lifetime and now want my family to benefit.
Yes, what I mean is that if I was 99, I wouldn't care much about being punished for being a thief. I could therefore make a lot of people happy. If not my family, then maybe I could go Robin Hood, steal from the rich and sell cheaply to the poor.
I can't imagine that it works that way. I can believe that as a buyer of stolen good without knowing they were stolen, you won't be punished. But you will still have to return the stuff. I am not a lawyer either, though.
If it works as you describe, let's found a guild of 99 year old Robin Hoods...
> If not my family, then maybe I could go Robin Hood, steal from the rich and sell cheaply to the poor.
Note "for value". If the price is unrealistically cheap, the courts can point out that the buyer should have been suspicious.
> I can't imagine that it works that way. I can believe that as a buyer of stolen good without knowing they were stolen, you won't be punished. But you will still have to return the stuff.
You don't have to return it, it's yours now. The point is that the bona fide purchaser is not a criminal and acted in good faith. If, however, there is the slightest whiff of a hint of a suspicion, those bona fides collapse and title reverts to the original owner.
It is harder to prove bona fides than you might think. Got a great price? Not for value, test fails. Knew the seller? Not bona fides, test fails. Bought it from someone who has no history of selling those items? Possible notice, test fails. And so on.
Look, here's the thing. Lawyers and judges have been working on this system (the common law) for nearly a thousand years. For day-to-day stuff like property, the loopholes are well and truly closed and have been for hundreds of years.
That I was an inadequate law student and now am an inadequate explainer does not change the fact that the common law is pretty damn adequate at providing sensible legal protection for almost all imaginable transactions.
Another question: what happens if somebody steals my Porsche and sells it to somebody else, but I still have a set of car keys. One day I notice my Porsche parked on the curb, use my keys to enter it and drive away? Is it then a Schrödinger-Porsche that belongs to both me and the person who bought it off the thief?
What if I never even noticed it was stolen?
In fact, as the thief, why even bother with stealing? Why not just sell, say, houses on ebay that don't belong to me?
A thief steals a widget from you and sells it to me for $x. I have no reason to suspect it was stolen.
The thief then absconds with the $x and spends it on consumable goods; even if caught, the cash can't be recovered from him.
I currently have the widget and have lost nothing; you're currently the thief's only victim. But if the court takes the widget from me and gives it to you, you're fully compensated, while I am now the victim, because my $x has effectively been stolen with no compensation.
In other words, there are two people who have been victimized by the thief, but all the court can do is re-assign victimhood to one party or the other, which, all things being equal, it should be indifferent to. Allowing the purchaser to keep the widget is basically the same as saying that they'll have no part in deciding who is to be the victim, and allowing circumstance itself to determine that.
But the thief himself is always responsible, and it's entirely appropriate to extract from him as much compensation for both victims as is possible.
[in my state] a title is an abstract bundle of rights and the piece of paper is a certificate of title. Having the certificate makes it easier to attempt to transfer the title, but lost certificates can be recovered and fraudulent transactions can be unwound.
In addition to what jacques_chester has said, never forget the law is adjudicated by humans, not computers. If a judge thinks you've found a "loophole" there's no guarantee he's going to take that too kindly to that line of argument. Yes, we've all heard stories about loopholes that worked, but for every one that did there were a great deal more that did not.
SO if I understand this correctly, by buying the coins at ridiculously low prices and the fact that in the post he said it was weird and he tried to take advantage of it. Would he not completely fail the test?
He doesn't know they are stolen. It could have been a legit attempt to panic the market by someone hoping to recover their losses plus some profit in the recovery. It's not illegal to ride along.
I don't know. I imagine there is a body of caselaw dealing with these rules in the context of financial instruments and currency trading that would give more detailed tests.
I'm still confused about whether or not bitcoin transactions are traceable. If they have deniability, it might be impossible to prove/disprove that you knew the goods were stolen.
Of course, I am neither a lawyer nor a crypto specialist and this isn't legal advice.
(In particular, the rules vary depending on whether the property is realty, on whether you have a Torrens system, whether you have fused equity and what your local courts and legislatures have decided).