Current Events > Moral Question CE: The Magic Anonymous Safety Deposit Box

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Suppose there's a magic safety deposit box vending machine. The way it works is that you plug in a number between 1 and 1,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Then that box is fetched from the void and you can place things inside it or take things out of it. There's no explicit connection to you: anyone who chooses the same number can also open that box and take your stuff out or put their stuff in. There's no limit to the number of boxes that you can use (besides the total number of course).

Why would you put something in this deposit box? Well, the contents have no connection to you. You could store illegal things if you wanted. There are locations everywhere connected to the same magic system, so you could transport illicit goods to other people just by telling them what number they need to put in to open that box. And even if you don't want to do something illegal, maybe you have items you don't want associated with you.

Now statistically, if you pick a number randomly in that range you will end up with a box that has never been used before. You could spend all day generating boxes for the rest of your life and it would never even be close to likely that you get a previously used box.

However, there are human beings using these boxes. So if you pick box "6969", there's probably someone who thought they were funny picking that.

So here's the question: is it immoral to take the contents of any box you open?

(This is a thinly veiled Bitcoin question, but I'm not sure how many people know the actual mechanics behind it)
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