That would be a really interesting test case (the hard drive one) which I think we missed a golden opportunity back with $10,000 CAD packages that node locked to the drive serial number.

But to address your original comment, you are absolutely correct that folks can create arbitrary currencies out of arbitrary goods (such as bicycles), but some make better choices than others.

Bicycles have the benefit of having both a 'property' value which was established by their replacement cost (great posts on Priceonomics on that[1]) but a poor recovery rate. They are also hard to store and are distinctly less useful to people far away from you because shipping has high costs. You could use in-game WoW items, but they too get little respect when stolen [2] :-) Casino chips however are a great analog, not only because they translate 1:1 to dollars but also because I grew up in Las Vegas and had lots of experience with them as a "currency" and later as a forbidden currency.

When Casino chips are stolen, surprisingly enough, the police don't care. Which is to say that as far as the police are concerned they have zero value (even though they have a nominal face value) That value is enforced by the casino not the state. So casinos care when they are stolen and take responsibility for punishing the people who steal them.

There was a series on one of the discovery channels called "Cheating Vegas" [3] which talked about some of the higher profile ways in which casinos were taken advantage of and something you should note if you get to see it, is that the people who stole Casino chips and forged casino chips, they aren't accused of theft they are accused of cheating the casino. It's a weird thing but people go to Vegas in order to "get" chips from the casinos, the casinos make up games with rules by which they can do that, and the gaming commission ensures that neither the customer nor the casino can violate the rules as stated. Forging casino chips isn't so much a "crime" as it is an unlicensed way to accumulate chips. How strange is that? Anyway the point is that the Casinos spend a ton of their own money (a portion of their profits) on security systems, private guards, etc.

To achieve a similar enforcement system with Bitcoin you would need some agency which used part of their profits to hunt down and deal with people who acquired their BitCoin in an unapproved way. So lets say Mt. Gox did this. They took 1% of their transaction charge and funded a team of ex-special forces types working for Blackwater[4] to apprehend them. Then what? Under what you and I recognize as "the law" the status of BitCoin is the same as gold coins in World of Warcraft, a digital product that some people are willing to exchange for other currencies.

So here is the bottom line, if you steal a currency that is issued by a country as legal tender, that country has an internationally recognized right to prosecute in their judicial system. If you steal a currency that is issued by a private enterprise their actions are limited by what they can do in the Terms of Service (for game companies) or adjacent laws (in the case of gambling). Stealing this stuff really pisses people off and its wrong but in all the ways that count it isn't actually "illegal" as far as I can discover. (would love to hear a legal theory on prosecuting a bitcoin theft btw, I've been chatting off and on with my public defender sister-in-law and she hasn't come up with one either)

[1] http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/30393216796/what-happens-t...

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSyjcib_Fps

[3] http://america.discovery.com/tv-shows/cheating-vegas/about-c...

[4] http://academi.com/ (renamed Blackwater, see http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/blackwater-renames/story?id=15...)