Readit NewsWhat matters is if Medjedovic engaged in activities that would be illegal in the process of acquiring the funds from Indexed Finance. A theft is theft whether it is physical or digital; victims aren't required to have perfect security and criminals are not allowed to exploit weaknesses to just take something that belongs to someone else.
Medjedovic is accused of exploiting "glitches." From a legal perspective, that would be no different from a thief exploiting a "low" wall or an unsecured window. Glitches aren't invitations any more than an open window. In other words...not a defense. (And in the U.S., specifically see the Avraham Eisenberg case, which is basically the same fact pattern. Eisenberg lost. His sentencing was postponed to last week but appears to have been postponed again.)
Then he skipped town after he was ordered by a court to put his tokens into escrow. If he truly believed that "code is law" and that the tokens were rightfully his, he wouldn't have skipped town. At that point...his own actions demonstrated that he didn't believe that what he did to acquire the tokens were legit. (The Fugitive notwithstanding, innocent people don't run.)
Then he "exploited glitches" for another DeFi. See above.
Then he attempted to launder the tokens...with some guy he found on the internet. Someone who legitimately believed that they legally owned the tokens would have hired lawyers, not money launderers, to gain access to their property. (Aside: any money launderer willing to launder money for a stranger is almost certainly undercover law enforcement...)
Then he moved to a country without an extradition treaty, and in the past few months has been spouting racist far-right nonsense in the hopes of getting pardoned.
Is he guilty? His own actions say that even he thinks he is.
I like the analogy of an unsecured window. It doesn't seem to apply to a hypothetical (idk specifics of this company) purely private company in some crypto-friendly country that doesn't have any ties to the rule of law.
Wikipedia says it is "considered one of the best anime series of all time by critics and fans alike.". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steins;Gate_(TV_series)]
I'm not the only one think of this movie recently
*Actually now that I think about it, I don't seem to miss the lack of History in vector editors (and just use undo).
Very exciting project. It started as a dream journal app many years ago when I was a student, and will now soon have a full interactive step-by-step guide with practical tools to achieve your first lucid dream.
It's android only, but I've started working on an iOS version and am thinking of raising some money or doing some crowdfunding to accelerate the development.
Interesting side-note : the people he took/stole from - they offered him 10% if he returned the rest. He said no in a tweet trolling them.
Contrary to the opinions in this thread, I think he was smart to run away. Remember that he did this from Canada, not the US. Countries don't have the same extradition treaties with Canada that they do with US.
If he had stayed, he would almost certainly be convicted. No court can possibly understand "code is law". Courts' job is only to interpret the law, not make the law. And the law was not written for crypto. You cannot fit a square in a circle without distortion.
What I think would have happened is the courts, rather than introducing novel precedent, would have preferred to just rely on existing case law and declare him a criminal.
Another interesting side-note : the judge presiding the case made a public comment asking the guy to come back to Canada promising him a fair trial. The guy didn't show up - maybe he didn't receive the message.
Overall, even with the benefit of hindsight, we still can't be sure if he was smart to exploit this or not. Forced to live in a few countries but with a lot of money.
* It's because (1) laws were designed when numbers were lower (no one had $16M to steal); (2) humans can't visualize big numbers (individually, $16M is just as big as $65M in my head)