
Quadriga Crypto Mystery Deepens With ‘Cold Wallets’ Found Empty - dclusin
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-01/quadriga-has-6-cold-wallets-but-they-don-t-hold-any-crypto
======
glitchc
I’m willing to wager a decent sum of money that Gerald Cotten is not actually
dead, but has rather absconded with all of Quadriga’s holdings, and is
currently in hiding waiting for the buzz to die down.

~~~
Deimorz
I also think he's probably not dead, but I don't think he absconded with the
holdings. I think it's a slightly different situation: there _aren 't_ any
significant holdings left, and haven't been for a while. I think he already
spent/lost almost everything they had, expecting that crypto would go up and
everything would work out. Then it went down and stayed down, his plans blew
up, and he knew he was screwed and could never pay the users back.

That is, I don't think it's an exit scam, I think it's a desperate attempt to
hide a massive failure in running the exchange. The "we can't access the cold
wallets any more" was intended to be a believable excuse that would explain
why they couldn't return people's money.

~~~
pjc50
The eternal bitcoin question: malice or incompetence?

~~~
msh
Well && is also possible instead of ||

~~~
pjc50
Ah, of course - what if he stole the cryptocurrency then accidentally died
while being the sole holder of the passwords? Oh well, unrecoverability is a
feature, as people keep reminding us.

~~~
SZJX
Or maybe he stole the funds dreaming to make more, but only to get crushed as
the market crashed, and now went into the hiding, as an earlier poster
suggested. It's also possible that he just absconded with all the money
though.

------
tim333
If you fancy a challenge:

>Crypto exchange Kraken is offering up to $100,000 to anyone who can help
solve this year’s biggest blockchain mystery: what happened to QuadrigaCX’s
coins? ([https://www.coindesk.com/kraken-exchange-
offers-100k-reward-...](https://www.coindesk.com/kraken-exchange-
offers-100k-reward-for-missing-quadrigacx-crypto))

------
oblib
For a tech touted to be a complete and indisputable record of financial
transactions it sure seems like a lot of cash has disappeared within it.

I don't claim to know anything about blockchain tech but I have been exposed
to the hype around it and the mystery for me is why anyone wouldn't have
cashed out long ago.

~~~
toyg
I just “cashed out” the joke £50 i “invested” in Btc a couple of years ago.
They are now worth £18.

I expect the real sharks have cashed out a long time ago.

~~~
thinkmassive
If you held it for a "couple" years then you should still be ahead, definitely
not a >60% loss:

[https://bitcoincharts.com/charts/krakenUSD#rg730ztgSza1gSMAz...](https://bitcoincharts.com/charts/krakenUSD#rg730ztgSza1gSMAzm1g10zm2g25zl)

~~~
usrusr
Maybe dog years, or some unusual form of £ that has appreciated a lot relative
to popular currencies (conventional and crypto) in the meantime? Or 60£ in an
active investment between cryptos, occasionally taking on a little loss+fees?

I was originally planning to end this post with "or just making up some
numbers", but since GP was writing of a joke investment, active gambling seems
to be a reasonable assumption. And putting in 50£ in a toy account (and never
extending it with fresh money), leaving with 18 after years, that also doesn't
seem like an unreasonable thing to do. That's lower stakes than meeting for an
amicable 2£ per player poker night once a month. If the stated goal of a joke
investment is a dividend in entertainment, then passive is a terrible
investment strategy.

~~~
thinkmassive
I suppose the ironic thing is a passive investment should be worth triple what
it was 2 years ago. The bubble was quick, and I suspect “a joke investment a
couple years ago” is a way to rationalize the loss from FOMOing in at the top
about 15 months ago.

------
thaumasiotes
> Quadriga’s platform data is stored on the cloud with Amazon.com’s Amazon Web
> Services, or AWS. While Jennifer Robertson, Cotten’s widow, has asked for
> access to the data, she has been denied because it was in his name rather
> than registered under the company. Ernst & Young has requested the court
> grant an order authorizing access.

...is she not his heir? What's happening there?

------
UncleEntity
Someone claims to have found a bunch of their ETH stored at other exchanges ->
[https://blog.zerononcense.com/2019/02/28/quadrigacx-
ethereum...](https://blog.zerononcense.com/2019/02/28/quadrigacx-ethereum-
storage-found/)

------
goodroot
I am probably alone in this, but...

Yes, I lost $15,000 — but if you’re going to lose money on a budgeted, high
risk investment, it’s great to do so embroiled in the strangest of
human/technical dramas. I am loving it.

~~~
Sytten
Same for me. Lost less than you, but I was almost laughing when I heard the
news. Maybe we should crowdsource a movie to regain the money lost. That's
quite a plot we have here.

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
Quadriga Crypto: The Exchange That Never Happened.

------
JumpCrisscross
> _Quadriga was primarily run by Cotten, using his laptop_

A quarter of a billion dollars...

~~~
krapp
Surely you're not implying that there should be some sort of ... _regulation_
or _authority_ governing financial transactions at that scale?

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Especially not for crypto.

Given crypto's history, I have no idea why anyone would even consider such a
thing.

------
virtualwhys
Regarding Cotton faking his own death, see first link in this HN comment [1]

Seems highly improbable that his death was staged, there would have had to
have been several separate organizations all in on it -- if the reporting is
accurate, he's dead, the mystery is where is the $200+ million.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19291712](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19291712)

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pjc50
So, has anyone attempted to crowdsource-track where the money actually went?
All bitcoin transactions are public, after all; getting a large enough number
of people to say "I received transaction X from/to Quadriga" should highlight
where the central wallet was?

Alternatively, do we know what happened to the real money bank accounts of
Quadriga?

~~~
mayamatrix
Yes there are several such projects underway:

1)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinCA/comments/avzh7s/community...](https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinCA/comments/avzh7s/community_call_to_action_submit_your_verified?sort=confidence)

2)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinCA/comments/ar86lf/report_sh...](https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinCA/comments/ar86lf/report_shows_quadrigacx_cold_wallets_actively?sort=confidence)

------
woogiewonka
For a loss of this scale, you'd think the authorities would start looking into
Cotten's communication prior to all of this. I would imagine the things he
spoke about with others would provide some clues.

~~~
spookthesunset
> you'd think the authorities would start looking into Cotten's communication
> prior to all of this.

The irony is many of the people into bitcoin are the kind of people who think
tax is theft and the government should get out of everything in their life.

... right up until they suffer a personal financial loss. Then it is up to the
government to make them whole....

~~~
retsibsi
> ... right up until they suffer a personal financial loss. Then it is up to
> the government to make them whole....

I'm very much not a libertarian (or anarchist, or anything in that vicinity)
but this is unfair. We all have to work within the existing structures of
power; we can't just pretend that things are currently working the way they
would in our utopia.

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Myrth
lol at people who give strangers money for a promise to return

~~~
FabHK
Investing in stock and bond markets is "giving money to strangers for a
promise of a return".

~~~
Myrth
At this point it's propped up by buybacks and central banks that can print as
much as they want.

We'll see how it works out.

------
m3kw9
You wonder won crypto hasn’t caught o

