Agreed.  There are so many ways this could go wrong.  And then you think about it more and by giving it to a stranger, be it even a police man, you are just letting some body else take the funds and pretend it was not them.

I mean, Bitcoin is one of the few things you can steal any time and pretend you have not.  Give me a Private Key with some balance and after I take the funds out, how do you plan to prove it was me?

The conclusion of this story is probably that unless the owner of the lost Paper Wallet proves it was theirs and gets their funds back, there is no moral way of solving this problem.

In fact.  Even by taking the Paper Wallet with good intentions and not sweeping funds off it you are still possibly doing something wrong.  What if the initial owner finally remembers where the Paper Wallet may have been and goes back to the shore looking for it.  Then they find nothing on the beach because some body else took it beforehand.

So you leave it there.  But then some body else will likely take it.  This can go so many ways.  Maybe it is a kid and they are going to rip it apart.  Maybe it is some body who finds out it contains value and sweeps off the funds.  Maybe they just collect waste and give zero F's about what that paper may actually be, collecting it for recycling.

So what do you do.  Do you sweep it and hold on to it until the owner eventually some how finds this thread and proves it was them?  Then what happens if the owner never comes back.  Are you allowed to use the funds through the finders keepers rationality?

Also.  If you sweep funds.  What if one year from now the owner finds their Bitcoin Address, checks it out on a Bitcoin Explorer and sees their funds are gone so they give up immediately thinking there is no way they can get that back anyway.

Like I said.  Unless the real owner gets their hands back on the piece of paper, any 'solution' is surrounded by immorality.

-
Regards,
PrivacyG