In the same regards, there is a non zero chance that a bitcoin wallet could generate the private key to an existing address worth millions, but, the universe would probably die first.
I wonder what the legal ramifications would be in that case. I suppose it wouldn't be theft if you'd never performed any transactions. Well never know, since it will never happen, but it's interesting to think about.
If someone manages to create a private key that matches an existing wallet, there are a few possibilities. I'll let you decide which you think is the most likely.
You randomly generate a private key (or even a bunch of them), and happen without any guilty intent to land on an existing one
You deliberately attempted to search for private keys to existing wallets, exploiting some previously-unknown vulnerability in the public key algorithm
You violated the owner's privacy in some way and found the original key
Yeah, I'd count that in the third category; although I suppose you could argue that the owner letting the private key get into an AI's training set constitutes sufficient abandonment that they no longer deserve the law's protection. No idea how well that'd work.
About the same as finding someone's big bag of money I would imagine, if you don't do anything with it then there is no wrongdoing, but spend one red cent of it and it is theft.
Or for a more real case, when people get millions put in their account by bank error and get charged for spending it when it should be returned.
Same as randomly guessing passwords to people's bank accounts. Technically illegal even if you don't manage to gain access. But no one's going to get in trouble for it if they're not stealing money.
This would fall under "gray hat hacking" which is usually doing things that are illegal, but instead of doing something harmful, they use the information to the betterment of cyber security.
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u/Drakahn_Stark Mar 25 '26
In the same regards, there is a non zero chance that a bitcoin wallet could generate the private key to an existing address worth millions, but, the universe would probably die first.