@kTimesG Having a valid signature may satisfy the Bitcoin protocol, but off-chain it’s still treated as theft.
It's not theft if it never belonged to the one who claimed it theft.
I'd start there. By this logic, all the guys who solved puzzles so far are thieves.
By the same logic, if I add funds to private key 42, and I call it my assets, then I should sue whoever transfers the funds in the very next block. Correct?
Geez.
In the hypothetical case that you knew who stole your money, you could sue. Just because a door isn't locked doesn't mean you can break in.
The problem with this is that it's difficult to know who committed the crime. If someone discovers a vulnerability in secp256k1, then according to your logic, they could empty Binance wallets without legal repercussions, since you wouldn't be hacking them. It's just that you know how to add, and your math calculations easily give you the key. This is absurd.
Regarding bots, it doesn't have much to do with speed, whether it's who replaces the transaction last or with the most fees. It depends on the miner who includes the transaction and mines the block. You can send a tx and then replace it, and the first or second transaction could be mined, depending on which miner solves the block first.
It doesn't just matter who has the fastest bot, but who is the luckiest to have the transaction mined.
RBF is intended to replace stuck tx due to low fees, when these do not want to be taken into account by miners, but if the person sending the original transaction does so with enough fees and many miners include it in their proof of work, their transaction could be mined with the same chances as its replacement.