Do they actually believe they will ever own that money just because they keep yelling : "mine, mine, mine!"?
Maybe with fiat, sure. But not with Bitcoin. Not your keys, not your coins.
This isn't about keys, this is about claiming ownership if those coins are ever deposited into an exchange in the (far) future. I've seen enough questionable judge rulings to not be surprised if some judge in some country would go with this.
It's beyond stupid: if the coins are actually abandoned, they can't access them. But if someone moves them 20 years from now, that proves they weren't abandoned. There is no "claiming abandoned coins" in Bitcoin.
I agree, it is stupid. Which is the main reason it will not be enforced. And what happens if the coins are moved to a different wallet? Or atomic swapped to monero/litecoin/whatever?
Do they owned the swapped coins or only the same Bitcoin?Exchanges already have dozens of phony reasons to confiscate coins that do not belong to them. Creating more reasons is only going to make people reluctant to use exchanges, which I think is a silver lining. The whole philosphy of being your own bank needs to be felt more strongly by people in order to keep pushing towards a decentralised and non-custodial future.