It's a bit interesting how fuzzy the notion of ownership and stealing is perceived.

The puzzle creator is the owner of the coins, but he funded the puzzle's addresses for the sole purpose of an experiment to allow others to get the coins when they find the private key. By design of the puzzle you can't say someone stole the coins when this someone succeeded to find the private key and thus the ability to move the coins.

The puzzle creator doesn't mention bots to my knowledge and likely didn't anticipate the sad situation for a private key finder that there are lurking bots waiting for public keys being exposed by public transactions in mempools. That a private key can be computed in a fraction of the time needed to search it otherwise when the public key becomes public isn't the fault of the creator.

One can argue that finding the private key from a known public key is also a valid way to solve a piece of the puzzle. The creator has deliberately made this possible for puzzle pieces divisible by 5.

I find some claims people make here and in the other threads a bit puzzling. Especially those who accuse the creator of the puzzle are quite ridiculous.

Some things are a bit strange for me regarding the withdrawal of puzzle #66's coins.

• Why was the transaction fee rate oddly low for the first transaction which was then RBFed with a fee rate of 406sat/vB (afair about 50x higher than the replaced transaction's fee rate)?
• Why was the transaction even public?
• Why was the first seen withdrawal only for the 5.94BTC UTXO, leaving more than 0.66BTC behind? I could understand that the finder wanted to separate the dust from the creator's coins. If I were the finder, I would've moved the three UTXOs worth 0.066, 0.594 and 5.94BTC in a private transaction via slipstream.mara.com and leave the dust for the bots.
• So far nobody complained his hard search was exploited by bots or someone taking a shortcut. Regardless of shame, if you hate the bots, you'd call'em out.