3 ms·

I think the difference is the police officially recognize one currency and do not officially recognize the other. The U.S. dollar is backed by the full faith an

I think the difference is the police officially recognize one currency and do not officially recognize the other. The U.S. dollar is backed by the full faith and trust of the U.S. government. A cryptocurrency's value is backed by the amount of other fiat currencies pumped into it. If in the future, an authority figure (say, the President of the United States) created a cryptocurrency and ordered the FBI to prioritize cybercrimes relevant to that currency and drop investigations for others, you'd be in a bad place if somebody in a different state stole your money. He/she could never do that with the U.S. dollar, since manipulating that infringes on his/her literal ability to order people around.

andrewla 8y ago
There is not a separate crime of "theft of money" and "theft of property". Electronic crimes, like the theft of key material, is usually covered by different laws. In places where there have been cryptocurrency thefts that have been prosecuted, they have been primarily pursued as cases of theft -- the US statutory definitions of theft usually only use the monetary value (the USD equivalent) as the determiner of the severity. While such a policy of "do not pursue bitcoin theft" would theoretically be possible either as an explicit policy or an informal, I thing it would be unlikely to survive judicial scrutiny; it would be like insisting that car thefts only be investigated and prosecuted for American-made cars.