Why don’t we have these discussions about legality in any of these puzzle topics? I thought this was a Bitcoin forum. Sticky posts explaining that brute-forcing could be considered theft under certain conditions would help. This is the first time I’ve heard this explained here.

There’s tons of threads floating around that cover this stuff. It’s like walking into a gym and someone explaining ‘Hey, don’t drop the weights on your feet’. It’s just one of those unspoken rules. But yeah, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to have a quick reminder up top for the new folks.
