What is dishonesty?

It's been a few weeks since the great #HF23 #SteemHeist by Justin Sun and his Steem witness collaborators. My friend @apshamilton wrote extensively about the legal details but there was one detail in his work that puzzled me. It concerned the difference between the British and Texan definition of theft. Andrew wrote this:

The only difference between UK and Texas law is the use of the word "dishonestly" rather than "unlawfully".

However the effect is similar because for the act not to be dishonest it has to be based on legitimate belief that the owner gave consent or there is "in law the right to deprive the other of it." Neither is the case in relation to HF23.

I'm not a lawyer, but I've spent enough time around the law to know that there are rarely extra words thrown in. That word "dishonestly" struck me as odd.

So as I was driving home with my son from one of his after school activities I put on a podcast I occasionally listen to and at around the 17m mark (cued up below) it starts talking about exactly what the word "dishonestly" means in relation to UK law!

The brief version is that in the UK Juries used to be asked:

"whether a defendant must have realised that ordinary decent people would have regarded his behaviour as dishonest".

That's a partly subjective test and would mean a defendant could claim that HE didn't think his actions were dishonest. The more warped the defendant's morals, the better their chance of evading the law.

Following the case covered in this program in 2017, about a card player who used an edge counting technique to beat the house at a Casino in London, the application of the law has subtly changed in the UK.

They've shifted to a more objective test that no longer considers what the defendant would think of his own actions. Now a jury should apply the test of

"whether an ordinary decent person would consider the actions dishonest"

And that's what they should do.

What does this mean for the #HF23 Hard Fork SteemHeist? Well it now doesn't matter whether Justin and his crooked witnesses thought they were doing something honest or that code was law: when I've explained the story to ordinary decent people, everyone has seen that the Hard Fork was dishonest.

Listen to the show here: https://overcast.fm/+IPRokUfYM/16:43

A poker player who used a Victorian conjuring trick to win £7.7 million from a London casino left court empty-handed in 2017 after a court found he “took positive steps to fix the deck”. But now judges have decided that the ruling in Phil Ivey’s case should be the test for dishonesty. Joshua Rozenberg explains how it works, while a gambler tells us that the courts have got it wrong.

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