It remains to be tested in court whether a smart contract exploit is illegal, since there's an argument one is simply following the 'letter of the law' aka the

It remains to be tested in court whether a smart contract exploit is illegal, since there's an argument one is simply following the 'letter of the law' aka the contract. edit: this is also something different governments may take a different stance on. If the U.S. finds someone criminally liable, El Salvador may not. Also, it's contentious what the 'location' of the crime even is, as there are no physical servers which have been attacked; could the blockchain as a distributed database be considered to exist 'everywhere' or 'nowhere'?