
Digital exchange loses $137M as founder takes passwords to the grave - saidajigumi
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/digital-exchange-loses-137-million-as-founder-takes-passwords-to-the-grave/
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dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19060985](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19060985)

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miguelmota
Not your keys, not your coins.

Pretty irresponsible to not store the encryption key in something like a bank
safety deposit box or sharded across multiple people that don't know each but
come together like in the event of a death to reconstruct the key.

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gremlinsinc
what happens if 2 of those people die at same time?

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iwalton3
Scheme like Shamir's Secret Sharing [1] allow you to split a secret between
multiple people, and also set how many people are needed to reconstruct the
secret. For instance, you could share it with 5 people, and only require 3 to
reconstruct the secret.

[1] [http://point-at-infinity.org/ssss/](http://point-at-infinity.org/ssss/)

~~~
gremlinsinc
yeah, like they would be smart enough to pull that off, they couldn't even
plan for the worst. Unless his plan was take it all to the grave.

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chx
First of all, I find this whole thing sad and hilarious -- I have been
speaking up against calling it "investing in cryptocurrency" because a) it's
gambling not investing b) it's not a currency. Nonetheless, this entire thing
stinks.

1\. Sudden death from Chron's disease is not unheard of
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9780667](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9780667)
but it's described as a "rare complication".

2\. Where is the address of this cold storage so people can see the coins not
moving since the alleged death? I know people are trying to figure out the
address based on transactions from the hot wallet but if there is some
tumbling involved it'll be hard / impossible.

3\. In this 2015 article [https://archive.is/Gw2x9](https://archive.is/Gw2x9)

> Cotten, in turn, spoke to Quadriga’s security strengths, noting that the
> exchange uses multi-signature cold storage to secure bitcoin holdings.

This directly contradicts the claim only he had the key.

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thinkingkong
I signed up for QuadrigaCX but never transferred any funds through it. The
process involved exchanging quite a bit of personal information and
considering how they handled 137M worth of coins, I doubt they're treating
anyones personal information with even a single spec of security.

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dawhizkid
On a long enough horizon, every Bitcoin will be lost.

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NikolaeVarius
Maybe you CAN take it with you.

