I don't think bitcoin was even a recognized currency until 2014.. It is utter madness that someone can make a game today and you can be tried for winning on players technical errors a decade after the IRS decides if it is a serious speculative game. It's like back in the first MOOGs where people wanted to arrest in game thieves. Talk about killing your industry.

Bitcoin has been classified as a commodity, not a currency, so I’m not sure what you’re talking about.

I’m not sure why you’re downplaying this. If I maliciously exploited a video game for serious financial gain today, there’s a good chance that will be a crime.

In 2013 FinCEN and the IRS declared that Bitcoin was always property so you can't make some kind of "it's just a game" argument.

In 2013. He pled guilty to wire fraud in 2012. Can FinCEN/IRS retroactively determine something (like tradable skins in a game) is property and prosecute people over it?

> In 2013. He pled guilty to wire fraud in 2012.

He pled guilty on Nov 4 2022, the wire fraud occurred in 2012.

That's why I emphasized always. The laws and precedents saying that anything that quacks like property is taxable property are decades old so they predate Bitcoin. In 2013 the government just said "Remember these laws from decades ago? No? They apply to you."

If it's not property, what is it?

If you can own it, it is property; if people are paying money, or exchanging goods or services with value, for it, it is valuable property. Enforcement agencies publishing a ruling or opinion as go what kind of property it is (and isn’t) isn’t what makes it property.

If you find a bug in a multiplayer FPS (let's say d-pad rocking to allow you to wall-climb or something) that gives you a competitive advantage, and you use that competitive advantage to best players and win their assets in combat, can you be arrested for fraud/theft?

If you systematically use it at large scale and make enough money to be worth prosecuting yes. People have been arrested for writing code to play 100000 FIFA games a day in order to get in game coins to sell (https://www.theregister.com/2016/11/14/ea_hackers_charged_fo...). The wire fraud statute is incredibly vague and can be used to justify almost any prosecution. Some others: using fake names on accounts used for botting Ticketmaster is wire fraud, a wire transfer made as part of a commercial bribery scheme is wire fraud even though commercial bribery is legal federally.

If you trick somebody into giving you something, and they consider that thing valuable, you're on the hook for fraud. Doesn't have to be about official coins. Of course, if you're playing a game where thieves are part of the game, you have to accept that. Or not play the game.

> I don't think bitcoin was even a recognized currency until 2014..

It is not legally a “recognized currency” now (“virtual currencies” are essentially treated as non-currency properties), and it was both property and had value before 2014.

Wouldn't it at the very least be a recognized foreign currency, since it's the official currency of 1(?) country

Maybe; i was thinking of the treatment of crypto generally and the fact that BTC specifically has been adopted as legal tender and thus might be “foreign currency” rather than merely “virtual currency” to the extent that makes a difference.

I don’t think it matters to the offense here, which only relies on it being property with value, though.

I just started law school so don't take this answer as definitive but a couple of things I thought of were: 1. For the statute of limitations, I believe that the time point to look at is when the lawsuit was filed (as opposed to when the guilty plea comes through). All that matters was that lawsuit was filed __before__ the statute of limitations ran out. 2. Additionally, there are scenarios where the law/courts will allow people to file suits after the statute of limitations runs out but that varies by jurisdiction and by the law that governs the crime committed. (For more info, you can check out equitable/statutory tolling).

The dirty secret is that statute of limitations do not mean anything if prosecutors decide they don't. It is called a john doe defendant. The investigation was was opened before 2017, which was the deadline, in secret. When they found the guy they changed the name. Had the feds waited until 2018 or so before opening an investigation, it would have been too late.

If this is actually a legitimate thing, it sounds like the most ridiculous abuse I've read in this thread. By this logic there is no reasonable concept of 'statute of limitations' if a "secret" investigation can always be opened (or assumed to have been opened).

The only reference I can find to what you're describing seems to apply to civil suits only, where the legitimate defendent name is substituted back in during discovery. It does not appear to be a stand-in in criminal investigations.

The biggest misconception is that the statute of limitations means all you need to do is run down the clock. nope. as soon as there is enough evidence to open an investigation there is no expiration unless the investigation is closed and this is all done in secrecy. Rather, the deadline is from when the crime last occurred to when the investigation is opened. For example, the investigation into the identify of the 2011 geezer bandit is still ongoing despite the most recent robbery being a decade ago. Regarding the bank robber, it's not a secret because the feds are looking for leads from the public who have be able to identify him by appearance, but in the case of the hacker it does no good to put up wanted posters.

> Also, who was the victim here, and who reported the crime?

The crime seems to have been discovered as part of the tracing of assets subject to seizure in the Ross Ulbricht cases, which is why the bukk of the assets were seized and filed for forfeiture as part of that case, and not the separate case against Zhong.

On the statute of limitations issue, its worth noting that limitations may be waived in a guilty plea, and that a defendant might do so to a lesser charge rather than facing trial on more or more serious charges (such as money laundering and/or tax fraud and/or evasion charges relating to the subsequent transactions involving the Bitcoin, which occurred at least as late as 2017, would be well within the 6-year SOL that would be applicable there.)

EDIT: To be clear, I haven’t seen a link to the Zhong plea bargain or any indictment it may have replaced (much less what prosecutors might have waived at his defense as potential charges that were never filed), so the above on the Statute of Limitations is observation of what is possible in general and how that might relate to the case, not an explanation necessarily of what did happen in the case. While there are other ways the statute of limitations might have applied differently in this case than it superficially would seem to (e.g., tolling for a request for.foreign evidence if some was used to ttace the funds) the way described above still seems most likely to me, in the absence of more facts.