A man walked into a New York City police station, handed an officer a USB stick, and said, "Everything on here belongs to me now."

A man walked into a New York City police station, handed an officer a USB stick, and said, "Everything on here belongs to me now." The contents of that stick were worth a fortune. And he was using a little known law to make it all his. Here's what happened. So, there's a strange fact about Bitcoin that most people kind of half know. And that is a ton of it has just been lost. People bought it years ago when it was worth basically nothing and then let it slip away. Either they forgot they had it, they lost their password, or they died without ever telling anyone about it. A lot of Bitcoin sitting out there like this. By some estimates, hundreds of billions of dollars worth. And everyone kind of assumes it's just gone for good. Now, most people look at that and see it as a giant waste. But one guy looked at that pile of abandoned Bitcoin and thought something very different. If nobody owns it anymore and nobody's coming back for it, why can't I own it? He thought. We only know this guy by Noah Doe, because he did the whole thing anonymously. But the plan he came up with was kind of genius. He built an algorithm to hunt down wallets that looked the most abandoned. The ones that sat frozen for years, even when Bitcoin prices were skyrocketing. His algorithm flagged 42,000 of these wallets, including wallets that people believe are owned by Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious guy who invented Bitcoin and then disappeared. All in all, the wallets that Noah was going after held 3.8 million Bitcoin, worth somewhere around a couple hundred billion dollars. So how does this guy try to claim a couple hundred billion of other people's Bitcoin? Well, here's where the story gets kind of ridiculous. You see, there is an old law in New York that says if you find lost property, you're supposed to turn it into the police so the real owner has a chance to claim it. And if nobody comes to claim it, you eventually get to keep it. So that's exactly what Noah did. He put all of those wallets into a USB drive, walked into the NYPD 17th precinct, and turned it in to prove he actually tried to find the owners. He ran what might be the most extreme lost and found effort in history. He buried a little message inside every one of those wallets on the blockchain, pointing the owners to a website where they could come forward and claim their coins. And then he put out a press release to more than 800 news outlets across 37 countries. The message was basically, hey, if any of this Bitcoin is yours, you got 90 days so the 90 days goes by and a few hundred wallets suddenly came to life and moved their coins. But 39,069 of them continue to show no activity. And those wallets are exactly what Noah wanted. His police receipts and evidence to court and asked a judge to declare that all those legally belong to him. Now, before you get too excited and try this yourself, here's the catch. If Noah wins this thing, he can't spend any of the Bitcoin. That's because owning Bitcoin is nothing like having money in the bank. The only thing that lets you move Bitcoin is a secret password, a private key. Whoever has the key controls the Bitcoin. Noah doesn't have the keys. He's got public wallet addresses, the part anyone can see. So a judge can sign a piece of paper 100 times over saying that Noah owns these coins legally. But the Bitcoin network just doesn't care. Which raises the question, why is he even doing this? Well, nobody really knows. He can't spend so the most likely answer is what he's after is legal ownership. Being the first person a court ever recognized as the legal owner of abandoned Bitcoin is a brand new kind of something and something he might be able to sell or cash in on someday. Or maybe it's simpler than that, and this is just a giant experiment to see if the law will actually let him get away with this. Noah is facing more resistance, then perhaps he thought he would get. Owners of a wallet he's targeting is fighting back. A person who calls himself John Doe 33 filed to get the whole case thrown out. He told the court he's a natural human being with constitutional property rights. Meanwhile, a New York lawyer who had nothing to do with this jumped in for free just to fight Noah's argument on principle. He told the court a wallet sitting untouched for 10 years isn't necessarily abandoned. He said that letting Noah claim tens of thousands would be an industrial scale money grab that no law intended. So right now, the whole thing is on pause. A New York judge set a hearing for next week where she will decide whether this case goes on or falls apart. But win or lose this story gets at something interesting about crypto. In the normal world, the law is the final word. If a court says you own something, you own something. But in crypto, the law isn't the final word. The code is. Anyway, what do you guys think? If someone loses their Bitcoin, should someone else be able to claim it? Let me know in the comments and follow for more insights on investing in the economy.