Useful input - surely if the coins haven't been touched in 100 years it can't be counted as stealing
Yes it is still stealing.
- the way I look at it is that at the beginning, before most people here had even heard of bitcoin, people tried it for a while didn't really see it going anywhere and subsequently deleted/lost/no longer have access to wallet.dat with potentially 100's/1000's of coins.
This is exactly why it is stealing. You are not only stealing from the original owner of the coins. You are also stealing from every other bitcoin owner on the planet. Why? Because our coins are more valuable because of all the lost coins. If those lost coins start circulating again our coins become slightly less valuable for it.