Someone wants to use legal clauses to “pick” $293 billion.

A guy in New York, using the alias Noah Doe, had an algorithm scan 39k BTC addresses that hadn’t moved in five years, handed a USB drive to the NYPD, and used OP_RETURN to send out a 90-day message—then, if nobody responded, he planned to sue and claim them under “lost property” as a “finder’s claim”—with 1.1 million BTC allegedly still in there attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto and another 80k from Mt.Gox. He has no private keys—he’s trying to swallow the funds purely on the logic of “public on-chain = I found it.” $LAB

Most ironically, in early June, a 2011 “abandoned” address suddenly woke up, moving 35.55 BTC. The plaintiff quietly withdrew 44 addresses from the complaint himself. $BTC

On July 10, BPI entered the case to respond, with White & Case acting as counsel, and raised 15 defenses. The rationale was also straightforward: BPI’s own treasury has been sitting in long-term cold storage; by the plaintiff’s definition, those would already be “abandoned property.” If they won this case, they’d actually have to hand the money into escrow to be safe—meaning the judiciary would effectively force everyone to give up self-custody. $HYPE

BPI’s core is just two points:

Seeing a public key = seeing someone else’s bank account number, which doesn’t mean you picked up their money

Bitcoin only recognizes private keys; traditional “scrap-picking” law doesn’t apply

On July 14, Judge King held a hearing, with the Digital Chamber and attorney Ian Cohen already standing on the opposition side. If the plaintiff wins, “hoarding coins without moving them = losing coins” would become precedent, and all cold-wallet users would have to redo their accounting.
#GateUS合规扩展佛罗里达 #美伊战争阴云再起