Quote from: Mike Christ on April 12, 2013, 06:45:16 AM

I suppose you're right, but in other ways, I'm having trouble agreeing. Though no one person can own any word, or group of words, they are often attributed to them. For example:

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.
― Aristotle

There are likely many variants of this quote, but this is the gist of what Aristotle was saying; though it could be attributed to anyone, we assume Aristotle is the originator of this quote. But is he the originator of the idea? Impossible to know (and highly unlikely, anyway.) But we can at least say he, in a way, owns this phrase, since I cannot put my own name beneath it and claim I said it.

Now, let's say I took a string of numbers, letters, and punctuation, and created something that never existed before; couldn't I say I owned it? If this cannot be considered property, what of the patterns that dictate a private key? Couldn't someone own a private key? Though it is intangible, this person is the only one who owns it, and thus, owns the bits which make up a Bitcoin; but perhaps the major flaw in this argument would be, I'm not sharing this key with anybody, therefor it is, in fact, private, as opposed to a novel, which is meant to be read by other people. In other words, if I wrote a novel, and never let anyone else read it, could I then truly own that long string of paragraphs? After all, if I shared my television with the community, it ceases to be private property.

I suppose this is the major dividing line between property and creation. But it is rather funny how people can own another artist's painting.

I think the problem is with copyright, and this is something USA imposed its will on the world. I respect authors, but not copyright. As for Bitcoin Private Key it's your duty to protect it. If someone spends it, thats the end of them. We don't want a central authority protecting our BTC. Now that I think of it, I don't even like the idea of Bitcoin Police. I want full anarchy on the Internet.

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